There's nothing new about brand fanatics. People have been wearing product logos from Disney to Dodge to Dilbert on their clothes for years, effectively providing the manufacturers with free advertising on top of a profitable merchandise sale. And as Unilever and other companies have discovered, a robust web site is an easy and (sometimes) inexpensive way to gift the deliriously dedicated with a smorgasbord of digital delights.

But what about the other 80 percent? How can the Internet be used to attract a price-conscious shopper who only buys Dove soap when it's on sale, or there's a discount coupon in last Sunday's newspaper?

We all know that banners don't work. Traditional Internet advertising doesn't tell a story the way the best TV spots do, and even the new "skyscraper" ads running down the right side of many web sites today don't offer the same amount of real estate as print ads for disseminating a brand's various messages.

At Mainsail, we have always advised clients that the best way to reach an audience on the web is to develop content that interests that particular audience, much the same way packaged-goods companies such as Unilever pioneered "soap operas" in the 1950s. But it's important to remember that the characters in these shows weren't cleaning their houses; they were wallowing in complex romantic affairs developed specifically to entertain bored housewives.

The web works the same way. Instead of recipes and product tips, brands need to deliver content that entertains their consumers, with "brought to you by" marquees serving as the marketing payoff.

Back in 1995, we pulled this off for Glaxo Smithkline's Vivarin when we developed a series of web sites targeted at college students, a major market for "alertness aids" (caffeine pills). Instead of touting the superiority of Vivarin over coffee, Mainsail's sites took a lighthearted (some would say psychopathic) look at the things that mattered most to young adults, specifically dating, romance, spring break, summer employment, and even safe sex. Coupled with a free-sample giveaway, this approach was wildly successful for Vivarin, and helped establish it as a "cool" brand on university campuses, not to mention helped to increase sales.

There are three challenges to this approach: first, you have to truly understand your target audience, and develop an approach that speaks to them in their own language. Second, you can't link the content directly to the brand or even its category (again, nobody was ever shown doing the dishes in a soap opera). Third, you have to convince the client, which will probably include the IT staff, the advertising folks and anybody else with a vested interest in the company's Internet presence. And we know that's not always easy, or even possible.

So we recommend developing a promotion that doesn't involve rebuilding the entire web site. For DuPont Lycra, we developed an online retail showcase called "The Lycra Shop" with all sorts of cool tricks such as streaming audio that sits alongside the "real" Lycra web site run by DuPont's less experimental IT staff.

A silly stunt is even better; a one-day event that attracts a lot of eyeballs to a specific section of the web site. If you think big, you can even get the media to cover the stunt.

Finally, web-based promotions don't have to cost a fortune. Like with soap operas, which aren't exactly known for Titanic-level production values, it's the content, not the setting, that hooks the viewer.

Give us a call, and we'll help you brainstorm some concepts to trip the light fanatics into raving brand lunatics.

Based in Brussels, Chris Clark is senior vice president of strategic services for Mainsail. He is also the author of "Byte Back," a monthly humor column for Adweek Magazines' Technology Marketing.

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