You have 3 steps to conquer:

You must first "grab" readers ATTENTION !! In a sea of advertising it seems nearly impossible to catch quick eye of consumer. You are not only in a sharkpool of competition, but consumers of new millennia are skilled at tuning it out. This by far is most important point. If you can't grab their Attention, you can't leave a message behind.

Ok, you have grabbed their attention..Now what happens? The reader becomes consciously aware of you. Your ad now has a glimmer of life. This is readers "Conscious Stage". The memory chip you call a brain has just engaged. No matter how deep, memory is now there. Often, building a conscious awareness, is just that, a process of building. A consumer may not click with you first time they see your ad, but they may second, third or twentieth time. It could be a matter of days or even years, but that long, not forgotten memory has built a foundation of familiarity.

What's Next You Ask?

They form an "opinion". This activates decisive reasoning. They react one of three ways.

1) They react positively and most assuredly shift into fourth and final stage.

The death of Louis XIV. was announced by captain of bodyguard from a window of state apartment. Raising his truncheon above his head, he broke it in centre, and throwing pieces among crowd, exclaimed in a loud voice, "Le Roi est mort!" Then seizing another staff, he flourished it in air as he shouted, "Vive le Roi!" —Pardoe: Life of Louis XIV., vol. iii. p. 457.

Now I'll be first to admit that I'm not captain of bodygaurd for Advertising, so task of announcing death of advertising is not among my responsibilities. Nor is finding a successor to throne. No, I do less glorious task of search engine marketing. I'm quietly on sidelines as Dot Bomb after Dot Gone pass by in a funeral procession that seems endless. The parade route marching to funeral dirge and drum, glumly trudging through streets to mark passing of online royalty on a weekly basis.

This week we bow our heads in honor of passing of another advertising-reliant giant, HomeStore.com. Before that it was WebVan and WebMD and Wine.com -- I'm starting at bottom of a very long alphabetical list you can see yourself at:

http://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/dotcomlayoffs.htm

The deathmarch itself has been analyzed-to-death by everyone from network news anchors to newspaper commentators and pundits. I won't burden us with another perspective here other than to say that it's big business that has it all wrong in a twisted attempt to apply old models to a new medium. I wonder why it is that each new technology is constantly wedged into wrong shape hole because that is "where money is".

When television was first developed, we didn't know what to do with it because advertising was not so ubiquitous. We had print advertising in magazines and radio advertisement ruled air- waves. But everyone agreed that television was worthless . . .