Reporting from Los Angeles for UK’s Precision Marketing magazine 25th March, 1996. What practical advantage is there to internet marketing and does it attract a different sort of customer?  Ray Hanks explores the new media promise from the US DMA Conference in LA, a week before the Oscars. When the direct marketers of America gathered in Los Angeles a week ago for their Spring Conference, expectations were high because the intended destination for most of them was the brave new world of Cyberspace.  Interactive technology, we are told, is here to stay and the information revolution has irrevocably changed marketing life as we know it.  With 9.5 million Internet users already, the prospect is irrestistible.  Or is it? A striking mix of hi-tech presentation and typical American panache kept the myth or magic show teasingly alive for three days.  Running alongside the traditional conference pillars of database marketing and customer loyalty programmes, the complex interactive itinerary provided the US DMA team from New York with a Herculean task.  The resulting five-track lecture schedule was slick and impressive but quickly revealed the mother of all dillemmas.  We’re all excited about the new media, but what are we supposed to do about it? We might undesrstandably gasp at the frightening statistic from service provider America-On-Line that it is signing up 300,000 new customers every month.  But before you can catch your breath,       consider the reality that 77 per cent of all Web users never make a purchase.  Surfing without sales?  Technology that allows prospects to ‘interact’ offers a garguantuan choice when searching for information but, if it fails to induce an action to buy, the potential for direct marketers is dramaticaly weakened. In the opening key note speech, Vivid Studios interactive creative director, Nathan Shedroff admitted that there are very few good selling sites on the Web.  Worse still was his confession that he’d never actually purchased anything himself, despite spending much of his working life on the Net.  “Think of the Web as a new telephone system,” Shedroff pleaded.  “That’s where we’re at with the Web at the moment, although too many people have just stopped at the information level.” “The technology itself is not important, it’s the whole communication experience that matters and we’ve all got to work harder to turn it into a selling experience.” Reassuringly, some already have.  Department store group JC Penney have selected 500 products to actively market on the Internet and it plans to expand this to 1,500 during 1996. Convenience is the key attraction for many customers who purchase products not actively marketed, selecting them from the company catalogue but preferring this quick and hassle free method of placing the order. But - and this is the bit that gets real direct marketers double clicking on their collective mouse - nearly half of JC Penney’s on-line customers are new, never having set foot in one of its stores or opened the pages of a catalogue before. So are these new sales customers switching from other stores or was this genuinely incremental business created by the new media?  JC Penney electronic retailing manager, Marisha Konkowski has no doubts.  She says: “The profiles of these people are so different from the norm that we really do believe that these purchases wouldn’t otherwise have been made.” Once upon a time, JC Penney might also have defined its target audience in terms of the catchment areas of each of its stores.  Now with the Internet giving it access to customers in 150 countries, its virtual catchment starts to defy all previous rules of geography. New expanded markets?  New marketing opportunities?  Perhaps that’s why 2,000 profit-motivated delegates descended on LA. So if JC Penney can do it, what’s happening to the wannabees?  Is there a problem with interactive technology when it involves taking money?  Is it something to do with the rumours about the security of credit card details being used to make purchases on the Internet?  “Unfair,” claims CompuServe manager Keith Arnold.  “As far as I know, there have been no recorded instances of credit card numbers being stolen.” “Well, there was one,” says David Edwards, director of business development at New York firm Evergreen Internet, “but it took two students at Berkeley using $10m worth of kit to grab the details for one single card.  The industry got a lot of bad press for that, which seems grossly unfair.” Edwards went on to explain, however, that there was an illicit acticity called packet sniffing (don’t ask) where no less than 10,000 credit cards had been spirited away on the the Net’s ether.  “Okay, okay, so that bad press probably was deserved,” he reluctantly agrees. So, does interecative technology genuinely provide us with a new communications Utopia?  Or has showbiz mania moved into town a week early?  The truth is probably best summed up by Jon Alcorn, interactive services director, at Internet specialists CUC International. “Maybe we’re all basking in the unreal light of a false dawn,” he suggests.  “The whole industry - including Bill Gates - has been blindsided by the speed at which the Web has spread.  But when we’ve done a little catching up, this revolution will be for real.” With the number of Net users forecast to reach a staggering 200 million* by the turn of the century, any marketer ignoring the new technologies risks being left behind and lost in Cyberspace. Ray Hanks - March 1996, Los Angeles. * Author’s Note:  Latest estimate for worldwide internet users is over 1.8 billion. “Maybe we’re basking in the unreal light of a false dawn...but when we’ve done catching up, the revolution will be for real” Jon Alcorn, CUC International Website design by The House of Elliott Principal photography by James Nader