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Devotees of Troy and Linda will never know how their romance turned out. Bell Atlantic Corp. (BEL) has pulled the plug on its online soap opera, which revolved around the yuppie newlyweds. The weekly installments ran on the Bell Atlantic corporate Web site last year. The serial had lots of fans. It won rave reviews from entertainment critics. But the Baby Bells research showed Troy and Linda didnt do a thing to build the Bell Atlantic brand. No bounce in brand awareness surveys. No spike in consumer loyalty. Creative is fine, says Janet Keeler, vice-president for brand management at Bell Atlantic. But that kind of creative just didnt pan out. We want to build our brand on the Web. She and everyone else in the marketing community. Harnessing the reach and interactivity of the Internet to build and maintain brands has become the Holy Grail of marketing. Its the focus of conferences. The subject of committee meetings. The talk of the consultancy circuit. The tantalizing prospect of pushing a brand name and stoking consumer loyalty in the one-on-one setting of the personal computer attracts everyone from carmakers to newspapers. But as Bell Atlantic discovered, branding tactics that work in the real world dont always translate online. Its the biggest issue facing the marketing community in 25 years, says Elliott Ettenberg, CEO of Bozell Retail Advertising. What keeps us all up at night is the idea: Is my competitor going to figure it out first? The buzz about branding on the Net has intensified in the past year, in part because Procter & Gamble Co. (PG), the nations second-biggest advertiser, mobilized interest with its Internet advertising summit in August. More important, the first handful of legitimate, recognizable brand names have emerged from the chaos of the virtual world. As companies such as America Online (AOL), Amazon.com (AMZN), Yahoo! (YHOO), and Netscape Communications (NSCP) graduate from obscure virtual businesses to those that score in the 50% range on unaided brand-recognition surveys, marketers have begun to salivate. The potential is there, they say. A brand can grow and secure customer loyalty on the Net. And as todays huge generation of computer-savvy kids matures, that power will only increase. That has all of us wondering how can we do it, too, says Joel Anderson, who heads up Internet marketing for Toys R Us Inc. (TOY) To do it well is worth millions. Marketers, who have used TV and print ads for decades to imbue even cigarettes and dish detergent with an emotional aura, know full well the value of a strong brand. A brand is the emotional shortcut between a company and its customer, says Ted Leonhardt, principal of Leonhardt Group, a brand-marketing firm. But as the older mass media of TV and print become more fragmented and crowded, their ability to build brands has weakened. The advertisers whose real-world brands grew up with TV worry theyll be left out if they dont solve the enigma of marketing on the Net. For companies whose businesses are based on the Internet, forging a recognized brand name is even more important. With nothing to pick up or touch and hundreds of similar-sounding sites to choose from, online consumers have little to go on besides a familiar name. In cyberspace, anyone with enough resources to rent space on a server and build some buzz for their brand is a potentially dangerous competitor.

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