From a room full of crying infants with "Outpost.com" tattooed on their foreheads to an unattractive male techno-geek working at home naked, the majority of dot.com ads manage to entertain as they skim the rim of the totally tasteless. But the question is not one of taste, it is rather: Do the ads help sell the product?

Long before the dawn of dot.com commercials, Sega, then the godfather of testosterone-fueled, in-your-face advertising, was breaking ground for the new genre. Sega made the decision to talk directly to its consumers in their own language and risk offending just about everyone else.

"Sega is for gamers, by gamers. You have to know your consumer and not be afraid of talking to them in a way that alienates other people," insists Peter Moore, senior vice president of marketing for Sega of America.

"Once you establish that and the tonality of the brand, which, for Sega, is irreverent, unexpected, passionate and defiant, then your advertising creative springs from that position."

Sega tapped into the cool factor with young males through a series of campaigns that arose from the personality of the product and its consumers.

By contrast, in the attention-deficit Internet world, there's barely time to develop a product, let alone craft a well-thought-out strategy and creative campaign. Without it, what do these ads really sell?

For all the notoriety about the Outpost.com ads, created by Cliff Freeman and Partners in New York, most people cannot explain what the company does. While follow-up ads are planned that emphasize Outpost.com's benefits, will viewers ever get past their first vivid memory of a pack of wolves eating the high school band?

Provocative in an entirely different sense, Salon.com, the online magazine, built its reputation by providing a venue for discourse on subjects that are often controversial, and encourages exchanges between people with diametrically opposing points of view. The first broadcast campaign, created by Odiorne, Wilde, Narraway & Partners in San Francisco, is designed to reflect the diverse cast of characters who assemble on the Salon.com site.

The TV spot, which features an amusing series of digitally contrived interactions among famous people, such as Janet Reno dancing with Bill Clinton, is a metaphorical representation of Salon.com's "virtual" dinner party theme.

"We were really conscientious about not wanting to have a spot that was overly snarky," comments Patrick Hurley, vice president of marketing at Salon.com. "The distinction I make is that our ad is indicative of who we are. Other dot.com spots I find (tend) to use 'borrowed interest,' in that they don't think their offering is intrinsically interesting enough, so they use some other device to infuse interest."

Salon.com's first foray into tv garnered its own share of media attention from veteran newswoman Diane Sawyer, relates Hurley. "Good Morning America called us and said, 'Diane loves your tv spot and we'd like permission to run it in our program.' I thought for about 100th of a millisecond and said, 'of course.'"The spot ran during a feature segment on the show in which Sawyer and co-anchor Charles Gibson chatted and laughed as it played, pointing out the famous and infamous as they appeared on screen.

Hurley notes: "They [dot.com ads] aren't bad spots that lack creativity, but when you start to talk about what they do for the brand, it's another matter."

Sega's Moore empathizes with the Internet companies' struggle for recognition in a fiercely competitive environment.

"The dot.coms have a problem in that they're trying to create brand equity out of a gazillion companies that all end with dot.com."

He points out, for example, that, "if you're an e-commerce site, you only have two arrows in your quiver: selection and price, and maybe customer service. From that aspect, they have a real challenge on their hands."

WEB.FILES
Sega: www.sboards||19991101ega.com
Salon: www.sboards||19991101alon.com
Outpost: www.outpost.com