The Sweet Smell of Success.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Access Intelligence, LLC.

Best Of The Web Award Winners Deliver On Digital

Feel vindicated yet?

For magazine brands that stuck with the Web through hype, bubble, and bust, 2005 was a sweet year indeed. Ad sales spiked by double digits; profitability became the rule, not the exception, and many brands leveraged the Web's unique viral ecosystem to hold their own against dot-com behemoths and TV- fueled "broadband channels." While the print business wavered, the long- suffering "online side" not only became the growth centers for many brands but also idea centers where the next generation of critical digital strategies get hatched.

min's Best of the Web winners are hardly latecomers to the great Web bounce back. Most of these books started online in the '90s, and their winning 2005 entries reflect years of experience re-imagining content, and even re- imagining relationships with their own readers, for the digital realm. They embody the real coin of the realm in any new media platform - brand equity, not VC money.

The best example of a magazine brand's enduring power in a cluttered digital world is our own Editorial Excellence winner, People.com, which cut through the Web's massive rumor mills in 2005 with most of the major celebrity scoops. Trade titles like Variety and Chronicle of Higher Education (Premium Site Winner and Honorable Mention/B2B) flexed their brands remarkably well, using the Web to distribute their expertise outside their core constituencies.

Sure, blogging was the theme du jour everywhere, but it took a business book, BusinessWeek Online (Blogs Winner), to turn the phenom back upon itself with "Blogspotting," a blog about the business of...well, you know.

As digitization tends to commodify all information and reduce any content to "feeds," we desperately need the editorial creativity and design sense magazine culture represents. What pure play dot-com is capable of delivering RealSimple.com's (Design Winner) smart simplicity and visual economy? Can an RSS feed of business headlines demonstrate the kind of commitment AgricultureOnline (Microsite Honorable Mention/B2B) shows to the industry's next generation in its superb "Farmers of the Future" project?

Any Web site can slap up a rich media ad for a well-paying client. But only brands that know their audience, know their advertisers, and know how to use media creatively can turns ads into editorial events like CondeNet's Yoplait Quilt of Hope and Hogan & The Lee Strasberg Institute Minisite (Ad Presentation Winner and Honorable Mention). These are some of the best examples of real magazine media values and strengths leading the rest of the Internet to new levels of quality and depth.

And it goes both ways. The familiar brands fully embraced genuine interactivity in 2005, using the Web's unique tools to reach out to and include audiences and maintain editorial integrity. Parents.com and BusinessWeek Online's B-Schools Channel (Online Community Winners) combined peer-to-peer support forums with expert advice and information to create their own new kind of information-rich social networking genre. SportingNews.com (Online Community Honorable Mention) integrated user-generated content in sophisticated ways that leave the dot-coms playing catch-up. And the blogs - there was no end to the blogs from editors, staffers, even the occasional intern. Newsweek.com (Web site Marketing Honorable Mention) even monitors for readers how its stories course through the blogosphere. We love the contact and interaction this new trend brings to magazine staffs (we really do!), but so much blogging went on in 2005, we wondered what time and staff were left to write the print features in 2006?

We're sure they'll manage. What our 2005 Best of the Web winners all make clear is that the magazine industry is not just focused on winning last year's awards but on positioning itself for the bigger wins of the future. This year's Best of the Web honorees represent the smartest strategies of next year and the year after. These winning entries are the best examples of companies on a path to digital discovery, eagerly experimenting with the disciplines of format, platform and interactivity that move brands forward to the Best of 2010 and 2015.

-- Steve Smith, Digital Media Editor, min

Ad Presentation

Winner Consumer: CondeNet/Epicurious.com

yoplait quilt of hope minisite

Epicurious and CondeNet helped Yoplait communicate the brand's association with the fight against breast cancer by engaging the audience's own relationship to the cause. Visitors themselves construct a "Quilt of Hope" out of tributes to those lost to cancer and others still battling the disease. Extending Yoplait's "Save Lids to Save Lives" fund raising program, the site lets users create a customized lid for the virtual quilt. Clear and simple design tools offer backgrounds, color typefaces and messages that all stay within the soothing aesthetic of a quilt that, at last count, contained over 15,000 lids.

Each lid is assigned a number, which visitors can search from the home page, and the clean interface also scrolls through screen after screen of tributes. This is a rare example of advertising that touches and even sparks a viewer's own connection to an issue. The branding is subtle but ever-present in the form of Yoplait's own signature foil lids. And yet, the cause itself remains front and center. The Epicurious brand, too, retained its own subdued and calming aesthetic throughout the piece so that the minisite felt like a natural extension of the host. Perhaps the best evidence of this site's branding effect is its longevity. Long after the main campaign and promotion of the minisite in September and October, the number of lids continues to climb.

Winner B2B: CMP Media

dogear peelback

The new CMP dogear unit is a smart solution to an age-old Web problem: How do you get maximum, in-your-face ad impact on a reader without ticking them off with an intrusive interstitial? CMP's answer is to exploit the ignored corners of a Web page.

A small dogear in the upper-right entices audiences at the TechWeb Network with a relevant brand logo and lets these self-targeted viewers opt into a deeper experience. Click on the corner of these new ad units and the whole front page of a CMP property literally peels back to reveal a novel lead-in to a full-page ad experience.

The creative in the unfolding dogear matches the presentation in the landing page for a seamless, print-like experience. Both placement and timing are designed for maximum impact. Dogear campaigns typically run for a full week throughout a sub-set of TechWeb sites. Advertisers use them for lead generation, product launches, and Webcast audience generation.

The Dogear Peelback represents a clever evolution away from bombastic animated page interruptions and at the same time offers jaded techies a bit of eye candy.

The execution is well-tuned to a business audience that already knows the brands and product lines in his industry and prefers to stay in control of his interactions with a sponsor. CMP has transitioned the Flash-y ad unit from an age of intrusiveness to a new era of audience engagement.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

CONDENET/STYLE.COM

HOGAN & THE LEE STRASBERG INSTITUTE MINISITE:

BY HAVING YOUNG ACTORS MODEL THE LATEST FASHION AND USERS VOTE TO AWARD TWO STRASBERG INSTITUTE SCHOLARSHIPS, STYLE.COM ARTFULLY STAMPED THE HOGAN BRAND ON YOUTHFUL CREATIVITY.

HANLEY WOOD E-MEDIA

EBUILD:

HANLEY WOOD'S ENORMOUS DATABASE OF CONSTRUCTION AND DESIGN MATERIALS LETS ADVERTISERS LITERALLY WRAP THEMSELVES BEAUTIFULLY AROUND ENTIRE CATEGORIES OF LISTINGS WITH COMBINATIONS OF BANNERS, SKYSCRAPERS, ADVERTORIAL AND LOGO TAGS THAT ALSO MAINTAIN CLEAR BOUNDARIES BETWEEN AD AND EDITORIAL.

Blogs

Winner Consumer: BusinessWeek Online

Any magazine with half a digital clue put up blogs in 2005, but BusinessWeek Online understood better than most that a blog is not just a column by another name. Media writer Jon "Fine on Media" has it down cold, with brief, personal hip shots that are informed and invite reader discussion.

Likewise, Michael "Economics Unbound" Mandel opens up his thinking-in- progress with posts about ongoing projects and germs of ideas that readers can then help shape. David Kiley ("Brand New Day") is an invaluable, critical voice in the marketing world, one of the places media people go to get impartial takes on last night's commercials. And in blogs like "Tech Beat" and "Deal Flows," BWO lets its seasoned staff loose to create genuinely thoughtful and informed posts that have the weight of journalistic experience and the voice of engaged discussion group leaders. And rather than a mosh pit of feedback, BusinessWeek again flexes its editorial judgment by monitoring and formatting reader comments into a civil debate.

But BWO also uses blogs to stretch the boundaries of business journalism's usual coverage. BusinessWeek always boasted eclectic cultural coverage but blogs like "Auto Beat" and "Hot Property" keep...