National Post from Toronto, Ontario, Canada • 27

i B3 NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 19, 2000 ON THE STANDS Can two very different p' nle make a marriage work? That's the question Life tries to answer by talking with such couples as Celine Dion and Rene Angelil, and other seemingly mismatched husbands and wives. There is a 26-year age difference between Dion and her spouse, but, says the singer, "Most of the time, he acts more like a kid than me." In an introductory essay, Cokie Roberts, co-anchor of ABC's This Week, and husband Steven V. Roberts, a political analyst for CNN and PBS, write dresses rumours about her bisexuality and eating disorders. In a Time profile, Jolie is described as a "female James Dean" by Columbia pictures chairwoman Amy Pascal. The February issue of Glamour features the usual cleavage cover with teases touting "23 Erotic Ways to Make Sex With Him Sweeter" and "Sex and Size: Is He Too Big? Are You?" Inside, however; is an informative interview with U.S.

'Vice-President Al Gore about his plan to woo women voters. Don O'Briant, Cox News Service about their 33-year "mixed marriage." Cokie is Catholic, Steve is Jewish. During the holidays they top their Christmas tree with a Hebrew star. Playing a bad-girl character in the film Girl, Interrupted apparently was not a stretch for Angelina Jolie. In an interview with Jane, the actress talks about her wild life of drug use and knife collecting, and ad 1'-.

.5: -yi -i-if i I fi Wi mm StUPil or i. La, iMtAi dWl hmh 'A Commercials like this sitcom spoof for imoney.com will run in the prime advertising time of this month's Super Bowl. Firms whose home is the Internet are putting their names in front of people the old-fashioned way. Internet firms dot-coms are turning to the medium of television to advertise their messages. But just what is it they're selling? Buy our image, and maybe our product By Katrina Onstad you catch the Super Bowl on an American channel this Jan.

30, in between touchdowns and butt-slaps you might see some dot-com start-ups pay up front for their Super Bowl spots, in cash, so they won't have to foot the bill if the companies go bust. The irony, of course, is that Internet; companies those icons of the new media age are relying on the rusty old medium of TV to get their message across. And often, the message is another message. Dot-com ads are essentially ads telling viewers to check out ads in another medium (electronic); the real product being pushed in those colourful JCrew.com television commer- This Christmas, Canadian bookstores Indigo and Chapters both launched aggressive print, radio and billboard ad campaigns for their online divisions, trying to grab back part of the market dominated by American monolith Amazon.com. Even without TV ads, Chapters Online, which is 7Q owned by Chapters, took in last year, compared with $600,000 in 1998.

"When dot-coms started advertising, the main intent was to generate traffic to these companies' Web sites, but another major pur- 'INTERNET CONSUMERS ARE A DIFFERENT CAT THAN CONSUMERS IN THE REAL WORLD' not bad for an industry that barely existed five years ago. But until recently, dot-com ads have been less ubiquitous on Canadian channels. Tiffany Welch, VP of business development at imoney, a Toronto-based electronic financial services company that just launched a wacky TV ad campaign of its own, estimates that Canadian online companies are about six to 12 months behind their American counterparts. And in cautious Canada, media buyers are taking their time before getting into bed with companies whose value often exists only on paper. "The dot-com ad boom is a very American phenomenon," says media buyer Doug Checkeris, a managing partner of Toronto-based Media Company.

"Fourteen months ago, the Americans had a huge e-Christmas followed by a bunch of venture capital people throwing money at Internet companies. But if you look at it, there's nothing very logical about the investment in classical marketing terms. E-commerce really hasn't taken off to the degree that it would justify the massive ad expenditures of these companies." Mercer Management Consulting estimates that in 2000, U.S. Internet companies will spend on advertising (in all media, not just television), but take in only The question of viability has even ABC gawking: The network demanded that vironment need to be a little funkier." The question is: Is there such a thing as too funky? One American ad for Drugstore.com consists of a long list of euphemisms for constipation. Another, for Cnet.com, involves anal probing.

"Is there gratuitous advertising in dot-com? Absolutely," says Heisey. "There's gratuitous advertising in any category. Dot-com happens to be a pretty high spending category right now and what will stick out on TV is something that doesn't jibe. With some dot-com advertising, like the Outpost campaign, there's a huge amount of breakthrough, but little insight" All the innovation of the dot-com genre will come to a head Super Bowl Sunday. Usually, unless the companies that have bought ads on ABC have Canadian divisions, we don't see many of the American "event" ads on Global, the Super Bowl broadcaster in Canada.

But this year, online trading company ETRADE Canada will unveil its first television ad during the Super Bowl, coincident with its American parent company's version on ABC. The national spots, which Global says cost $85,000 for 30 seconds, are part of a $7-million campaign. Asked what the ads will belike, marketing manager Karen Biernaski laughs and says: "It's top secret, but I will say this: They're verycooL" National Post their financial future in the cliched vocabulary of shows like Home Improvement: "Honey, is there some way we could be paying less taxes?" The joke is an inside one, squarely aimed at me-dia-sawy consumers. "We definitely have a young, hip client," says Robin Heisey, creative director and partner at Gee, Jeffery Partners, the company that developed the campaign. Heisey and his team studied old sitcoms to achieve the commercial's pre-fab, plastic look.

"We did it note by note," says Heisey. "The couch is in front of the camera, the entrance is on the right, there's always a staircase. There are a lot of executional things about the genre that may seem subtle but are universally understood by the viewing public, particularly in our target group. We're so media educated, and we don't even know it" Using humour and attitude to push staid financial services a conservative advertising genre (think E.F. Hutton) suggests the Internet has created a new type of advertising audience, one filled with what Vassos calls "underwear clients.

"Internet users are a different cat than consumers in the real world," says Vassos. "I call it the Internet underwear theory. People use the Net when they're at home, stripped oif, watching TV. It's a casual atmosphere. Companies that want to address people in that en someone shooting gerbils out of a cannon, or a creature called a "fogdog letting loose a very loud howlvomit sound.

"Dot-com" ads like these for, respectively, Outpost.com and Fogdog.com, both of whose addresses blink fleetingly across the screen at the ad's end are unavoidable on American specialty channels these days, as any Canadian with an ESPN addiction can attest. Internet advertising on television is equal parts crass, perplexing (often, the product we're supposed to boot up to buy is barely identified bet you didn't know that Fogdog sells sports equipment) and utterly watch-able: Monster.com, and Ameritrade.com provided some of the most talked about commercials of last year. U.S. Internet companies spent $2-billion on television advertising in 1999, according to the PaineWebber Group, 15 times what they spent the year before. Traditional advertisers are being elbowed out of this year's Super Bowl the most seen, most expensive spots on TV by dot-com companies willing to pay up to $3-million for a 30-second spot cials isn't JCrew boxers, but the JCrew Web site, which advertises JCrew boxers.

It's a multimedia hall of mirrors, made all the stranger by the ephemeral definition of "value" in an electronic universe where many companies are worth millions in theory only. "There are some objectives of dot-com advertising we don't see," says Tom Vassos, an instructor in the MBA program at the University of Toronto who teaches a course called Strategic Internet Marketing. "Think of a company about to do an IPO: The objective may be, let's advertise to get our name out there and get an IPO going. The product isn't central." pose is branding," says Vassos. "After six months of being bombarded with the words Amazon.com, you don't forget the name." Even more important than the name in dot-com advertising is the image; not since the beer ad boom of the early '90s has style reigned so supreme in television ads.

imoney's new TV campaign consists of three sitcom parody commercials with the distinctly dot-com combination of high irony and low humour, opening with cheesy "theme" music and fake audience applause, replete with whoops. A young couple, buoyed by a laugh track, discuss How TV repeated lies about Diana Documentary tricked a paranoid British public the Royal Family and so on), was this: Diana was the victim of a premeditated attack because she was about to announce her engagement to the son of a man, Mohamed Fayed, reviled by the British establishment It is hard, at this distance of time, to summon up the fevered atmosphere surrounding Diana's death, an atmosphere that aided many bizarre fictions being taken as gospel. The image of the old Queen and the Duke and the Prince plotting on a dark and windy night with a crack unit of the British special forces to assassinate Diana (for what? robbing them of TV air time?) strikes me as the perfect piece of kitsch paranoia to conclude the 20th century. At the time I happened to see Diana: Secrets Behind the Crash, I thought it was hilariously ridiculous and was relieved to observe in the ensuing week that it was assailed by intelligent television reviewers and political observers in the mainstream British print media. What I didn't allow for is the tenaciousness of paranoia in the public mind.

According to a recent issue of The Spectator, there are still millions of Britons who bought into the ITV thesis, and still do. Hey! You could start a religion on faith like this. Thanks to a new book by a dogged journafist named Martyn driver that fatal evening. This culpability is emerging in various court cases Fayed is enmeshed in right now, particularly the appeal process in France following the official report on Diana's death that laid the blame squarely on Fayed's staff. What really poisons me here, though, is not the complex motivation of a dangerous buffoon, but the role of a major television company in endorsing all this fantasy in the first place.

That and doing so little to correct the record. The visual impact and emotional testimony in Diana: The Secrets Behind the Crash convinced many people that there was a terrible conspiracy responsible for Diana's death, a conspiracy still at work covering up its own handiwork. It is insidious stuff because it's so easy (and lazy) to knock the ever-assailed Royal Family and manipulate the maudlin, if well intentioned, empathy for Diana by so many people. It's junk journalism, adding zilch to the knowledge of the world except as a footnote on human cupidity. And frankly, until this mess is properly cleaned up by ITV itself, I'd say the company stands condemned of prostituting its credibility.

I John Fraser can be reached at ja.fraserutoronto.ca National Post the villa when Diana and Dodi paid their visit on 30 August, 1997; the fixtures and fittings had not been there either. Craftsmen employed by Fayed had copied many of the villa's key items. Nick Owen the documentary host and the caretaker were showing viewers around a house which had been entirely filled with replicas of some of the original furniture, decorations and paintings, including the Brockhurst" "The Brockhurst" was a famous portrait of the Duchess of Windsor painted in 1939 by Gerald Brockhurst, which was sold at the 1988 Sotheby's auction of the Windsor estate for about 65,000. According to Gregory's book, it was Mohamed Fayed who commissioned the reproduction and had it installed in the villa in time for the ITV film shoot The wily Fayed's motivation in all this is, I'm sure, complex. No doubt he's grief-stricken over his son and heir's death.

No doubt either that he loved fantasizing a close connection to the Royal Family, especially as Britain keeps turning down his application for citizenship. And not much doubt anymore, as Gregory makes clear in The Spectator article, that he bears indirect but major responsibility for the deatlis of Dodi and Diana because of the unfit state of his bodyguard and Gregory, published in Britain last week, all the hokum in the nv program has been laid bare and much of it traced straight back to the fertile imagination of Mohamed Fayed himseE In a Spectator article summing up the findings of the book, Diana: The Last Days, Gregory exposes the eyewitness who saw the "flash before the crash" as a former convict and mythomane (a pathological liar or fantasist). The eyewitness caretaker at the Duke of Windsor's former Paris estate, who spoke so movingly of Diana's and Dodi's plans of togetherness in the ducal property, turns out not only to be an employee of Fayed, but apparently wasn't even in Paris when the lovers briefly toured the empty premises. What really blew my mind, though somewhat lower in the catalogue of deception, was the fact that the producers of the program furnished the emptied house before filming. So vivid were the scenes at "Villa Windsor" that you had the feeling Dodi and Diana had just left a cocktail party presided over by Wallace Simpson herself.

Gregory details how Mohamed Fayed personally organized the refurbishing of the villa for the ITV program: "ITV's viewers were being doubly misled in June, 1998. Not onry was the caretaker absent from so in addition to the estimated 12.5 million viewers in Britain, there were tens of millions more around the world who saw it. It aired on CTV in August, 1998. According to newspaper polls taken right after airing Diana: Secrets Behind the Crash, many of the controversial principal claims of the television investigators were widely accepted. Among those claims was an "eyewitness" account of a bright flash just before the fatal crash (suggesting the use of guns).

This came after affecting testimony of a further eyewitness account detailing the intimate plans of Diana and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, to move into tike Paris residence of the late Duke and Duchess of Windsor, with financial assistance from Dodi's father, the notorious Anglo-Egyptian money mogul Mohamed Fayed. The program's thrust, supported by all the paraphernalia of documentary production (strong visuals including affecting close-ups of eyewitnesses and graphic illustrations, leading questions, subliminal messages such as quick cutaways toinister members of John Fraser on Media In June, 1998, the racy but respected independent British television network ITV aired a gripping investigative documentary on "unanswered questions" relating to the tragic death in Paris the summer before, of Diana, Princess of Wales. The program was picked up in the United States and many jiher countries,.