Once a forum for the likes of grocery-store jingles and used-car specials, radio is seeing some of the fastest advertising growth in its history, thanks to the dot-com boom. Radio-ad revenues from Internet companies in the US are expected to nearly triple to $800 million this year, rivalling retailing advertising, says the Radio Advertising Bureau, a New York-based trade group.

Mail.com Inc., a New York electronic-mail services company, is lavishing over 75 per cent of its third-quarter offline media budget on radio. RealNames Corp., which replaces cumbersome Web addresses with key words, says it is using radio to saturate six critical markets. "The Internet world," says Barbara Gore, senior vice-president of marketing at RealNames, "has become consumed with the radio medium."

And what silly ads! To tout CMGI Inc.'s AltaVista Co. Web site,one radio spot features a British-sounding announcer who suggests consumers use their savings from the company's free Internet service to become lords and raise thoroughbred ponies. Pets.com's new radio campaign features a self-described "Spokespuppet dog thing" that speaks in surfer slang and asks barking dogs about such pastimes as "drinking chilled water from the toilet." The rush to radio illustrates some of the realities of building an Internet business in the late 1990s. With more initial public offerings and Christmas in the wings, advertising executives say, many Internet companies don't have time for carefully honed branding strategies and complicated media campaigns. They see radio as a fast and relatively inexpensive way to get their names known.

Fast and relatively inexpensive

A spot can be written, produced and running in just a few weeks or less. Bruce Mowery, marketing vice-president at More.com Inc., which sells drugstore items on the Internet, says a radio campaign can be createdin as few as three days, compared with a minimum four weeks for a TV spot.

"Television is the most powerful medium - and probably will be for the foreseeable future," he concedes. But "speed is important, particularly when you're moving in Internet time."

"It's a herd mentality," says David Smith, whose San Francisco firm Media-smith Inc. places advertising in a variety of media for its Internet clients. "Even though they're on the Web to be different, they want to make sure they're doing something safe so they can get to their next round and do their IPO." Even investment bankers and venture capitalists are steering some of their Internet companies towards radio advertising. "Radio is a magic bullet in the eyes of the investment community," says Tom Bedecarre, partner at Havas Advertising Group's Citron haligman Bedecarre, who has been visiting venture-capital firms to court new clients.

Since most Internet companies focus their efforts in cites on the US East and West Coasts, the price of air timein those markets is rising steeply. KZQZ, a Bonneville International Corp. top-40 station in San Francisco, says Internet advertisers have gobbled up half of all its ad time, up from nearly nothing a year ago. A single 60-second spot now costs more than $1,200, up from $350. The best spots sometimes top $2,000 - roughly what it costs to get a spot on the local morning TV news show.

"This is the best year in the history of radio," says Joseph Cariffe, KZQZ's general sales manager and chairman of the radio bureau's sales advisory council. Many advertising executives caution that a radio-centric strategy isn't necessarily the best way to build an enduring marketing strategy.

"Can you name any brands built solely on radio? I can't name one," says Wayne Buder, partner at Odiorne Wilde Narraway and Partners in San Francisco.While radio is effective at prompting a consumer to take immediate action, the tactic may not work in the long run if a company hasn't given consumers a reason to care about its businessin the first place.

"Everyone's building the same categories, and they all have the same message: Go online. It's convenient," says Tom Romary, vice-president of marketing for Fogdog Sports, a Redwood City, California, start-up that sells sporting equipment over the Internet.

Even radio's biggest fans in the Internet world concede that the frequencies are getting very crowded. A few years ago, companies like Amazon.com Inc. made a big splash on radio, but they got noticed in part because they didn't have many Internet rivals. Today, with Internet advertisers filling as much 25 per cent to 50 per cent of air time on popular shows, station managers can't stagger the ads the way they do for rival car dealerships and department stores.

The result: "There's so many of them, it's really hard for any of them to stand out," says Paula Mangin, a partner at Odiorne.

`Added incentive'

But for Web advertisers, radio simply reaches a lot more people for a lot less money. "In the main, radio is alwaysconsiderably cheaper than TV," Mowery says. "It's an added incentive."

Given the ease of production, radio ads are particularly attractive to start-ups that haven't necessarily thought through their branding strategy. Fogdog Sports, for example, put together radio spots using freelancers before it hired Odiorne as its agency. Later, it scrapped its original plans and is now focusing more of its horsepower on television, with radio taking a more traditional supporting role. Judging from the boom in Web ads, radio-industry veterans express optimism that this year could be the start of a new era in which the medium finally gains the respect - and advertising dollars - accorded other media outlets.

But KZQZ's Cariffe isn't taking any chances: He says he tries to accommodate his traditional radio advertisers despite the flood of new business. "There will be a shake-out in the months to come, you know," he predicts. "I wouldn't want to count on all of it being around."

(The Asian Wall StreetJournal)