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Just click me, baby!

Kamla Bhatt in San Francisco

Just click me, baby!
Let us deal with it.
I was born to web.
Give the people what they want.
Infectious content.
One dot shopping.
Be the best, cheap SOB you can be.

Catchy start, right? They are all taglines from dot com companies: egreetings.com, Dell Computers, isyndicate.com, storerunner.com, ewanted.com and dealtime.com. How many of these new economy companies do you recognize? These creative hooks are meant to rope you into the New Economy and away from the Old Economy

Here a dot-com, there a dot-com, everywhere a dot-com. Verbs, common and proper nouns all have a powerful dot-com existence in the Internet world. They are proliferating everywhere. You simply cannot escape the advertisement blitzkrieg of the dot-com companies here in the digital fountainhead of the US economy: Silicon Valley. Perhaps, Boston comes close to the Valley and that can be explained by the presence of Route 128. And the hoardings on Mass Turnpike pale in comparison to the advertisement carpet-bombing in the Bay Area. Those boards also poke fun at the massive renovation in progress in downtown Boston. But, the ads that we see here in the valley -- they woo you, with their vibrant colors and taglines constantly vying for your straying attention and their messages telling you that they know what is best for you.

Adweek estimated that about $ 3 billion was spent on advertisements by less than 100 nascent and older companies. And these are helping them redefine their business paradigm. Webvan is reported to be spending about $ 200 million a year on advertisements and C|Net will be spending half that amount. It is reported that a new portal called computer.com will spend about $ 3 million in advertising. The bulk of it will flow into a minute-and-a-half of commercials during the Super Bowl in January. The company recently got about $ 6 million in funding.

"The Internet Expressway," or "Defender of the World" are some of the innovative taglines you can spot on the narrow streets of San Francisco. Their taglines, along with the "dub, dub, dub address" or the "triple w address," appears on cars, hummers, boats, radios, phones -- every imaginable way of sending the message across has been exhausted. Flag a taxi in the Bay Area and you may find a cab painted with the recognizable purple and yellow Yahoo colors pull up. Board Mini Bus No 38 and it is most likely covered with the bright yellow and red of C|Net.com. Last Christmas season, MySimon.com folks took to driving a hummer with their company signs plastered all over this combat vehicle.

Drive down highway 101 and lift up your eyes and you encounter the creative hoarding. The closer you get to the city (as San Francisco is known here), you see can spy the billboards near San Carlos, near Oyster Point, near Silver Avenue and all over Van Ness Avenue and SOMA.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a boat that had dropped anchor in the middle of the bay next to 3Com Park with a huge hoarding urging us to click on a web site. Speeding drivers slowed down and craned their necks to read the message but the question is how many eagerly typed in the URL to see what it was all about?

As you leave Van Ness Avenue, the main artery of the city to get onto 101, you see a huge billboard proclaiming that even your grandmother can do it. They are talking about building web sites.

Companies are trying new ways of getting that elusive branding since it "may" lead to an increase in the sale of their products. Many dot-com companies, with Indians in their management team, are also using creative ways to brand their company products. Some are getting brand recognition from their well-publicized moves while others are relying on models.

eLance.com, a New Jersey-based company moved lock, stock and barrel (should it be networks, PC and servers?) to Sunnyvale, California. The company managed to get a lot of mileage from its relocation, right from the Wall Street Journal to the local TV news in the Bay Area.

WebEx, a Los Angles-based virtual meeting service founded by Subrah Iyar, recently hired RuPaul, model, singer and drag queen as their official spokesperson. The ingenious model is reported to have said that prior to WebEx "meetings used to be a drag!" "WebEx drags RuPaul into the Web," reads the title for an article in Red Herring. In just a couple of weeks, WebEx has the kind of publicity that start-ups dream about.

This frenetic advertising blitzkrieg has an "I made you look" factor but the question that lingers long after we see the advertisement is -- does it translate into profit? Or, is it simply a lot of white noise? It may be, going by the volatile numbers reported from the Wall Street for these dot.com firms.

The jury is still out on this, but by next year dot-com companies will know how they are faring. Until then, you can enjoy the best the copywriters can produce while you crawl the 101 corridor to your destination.

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