TV, Radio, and Print Are Sold Out. How About...Trees?
By Paul Hochman

(FORTUNE Magazine) – It's a desperate world out there for dot-com companies trying to buy ad space. So desperate, in fact, that the owner of Bostonhire.com, a job-posting site, has begun donning a ski mask and screwing all-weather posterboard with his company's name on it to trees along Route 128, New England's high-tech corridor. "It works," says owner Bryan Larson. "I've gotten lots of calls."

He doesn't have much choice. "Dot-coms went absolutely crazy in the fourth quarter of '99," said Kristian Magel, vice president of national broadcast buying at DeWitt Media. "They came in and bought everything that was left in the television market at exorbitant numbers. And radio was even uglier than TV." The scant remaining ad inventory is astronomically priced: Rumor has it that two companies paid $3 million each for a single 30-second spot during the Super Bowl; in May they could have purchased the same time for $1.8 million.

That's why more Internet companies have resorted to unorthodox marketing. One fledgling dot-com has paid tolls for drivers on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Another sponsors clowns who ride the New York subways and hand out branded Frisbees. Larson--who reports he spent about $500 printing his Bostonhire.com signs--says that while high cost is the primary barrier to entry into the traditional ad market, the only barrier he knows to tree marketing is embarrassment: "You know, if somebody comes along and tells you to get down off your ladder."

--Paul Hochman