Targeted Email Advertising Acceptable 8/6/00 Half of all Web users (51%) would be happy to receive targeted email advertising, according to the findings of a recent NOP survey. The Internet User Profile Survey found that over 6 million of the Web's regular 12 million users would be willing to give their email address to a website in order to receive targeted advertising on a subject that interests them. At the same time, similar numbers say that they have received advertising information by email in the last 4 weeks. However, the survey confirms that unsolicited commercial email, "Spam", is definitely not acceptable to Web users. 89% of those who've used the Web in the last 4 weeks reject Spam as an online advertising format. Furthermore, the results provide some good news for an industry concerned about declining banner click-through rates. A quarter (26% - some 2.5 million consumers) of Web users claimed to have clicked on banner advertising in the last 4 weeks, compared to 24% six months earlier. Announcing the launch of NOP's new Online Brand Monitor survey - specifically designed to monitor the effects of advertising and sponsorship for online brands - Richard Somerville, Associate Director at NOP New Media, commented: "All these findings confirm the importance and potential of knowing your Web audience and carefully targeting them. We believe that the increasing use of ad targeting technologies explains why, instead of falling, click-through incidence levels are actually holding up. However, this still left 74% of Web users for whom banner ads were only acting at most as a brand awareness and image support. Appropriate use of NOP's Online Brand Monitor would help advertisers to monitor brand awareness, image and other issues among this 'silent majority'." NOP screened a nationally representative sample of 18,000 British adults, aged 15+, and conducted 1250 follow-up telephone interviews with Web users between 1 and 22 December 1999.