Employees are spending more hours at the office, and often proportionately less time there doing work. So advertisers figure that workers" attention, already diverted by things like personal phone calls and online travel reservations, is ready to be caught by flashy online ad campaigns.

"Every time we design an online campaign, we assume people will be looking at it at work," says Mr Martin Cole, new media planner at Bartle Bogle Hegarty, an advertising firm based in London.

A break for sweets Kit Kat is doing its own bit to divert employees' attention. The candy-bar brand, owned by Hershey Foods Corp., is in the process of creating an online campaign dubbed "take a break." The online ads appear at intervals throughout the day, urging employees to stop whatever they are doing for a Kit Kat.

"The planners at the agency looked at Web usage during different points of the day and determined that it would be best, based on the nature of the message, to target people at work," says Mr Nigel Sheldon, managing partner at online media-buying firm digital, part of Mindshare, owned by WPP Group PLC, which designed the campaign. "Fundamental to the planning of that campaign was the recognition that people are online at work," he adds.

Mr Sheldon says that not all campaigns are designed to target people who are doing personal tasks at work. Mindshare places plenty of ads on financial news sites and other sites people might call up as part of their work.

But most advertisers admit that there is a growing recognition that workers are spending more time taking care of personal business and are acting like consumers at the office.

Retailers are beginning to catch on as well. Upscale grocer Waitrose in the UK launched waitrose(at)work in July 1998 to service ICL, a UK-based computer-services company owned by Fujitsu Ltd. of Japan. Waitrose(at)work allows employees to shop online and have their groceries delivered later that day to the office. The service is an added perk to employees who were finding it difficult to make it home in time to run errands, says Mr Bill Pratt, business marketing manager for Waitrose, part of John Lewis Partnership.

"The beauty of it is that you can deliver 80 orders to one site, using only a couple of vans," says Mr Pratt. Waitrose is considering offering home delivery for online orders, as many other grocers have done, but he adds that home deliveries wouldn't be free, as is the case with Waitrose(at)work.

The programme, which is now used by 57 companies in the UK, including British Telecommunications PLC, British Airways and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., is available free to employees. However, each company must pay a fee of "no more than 10,000 pounds (6,000 euros or $5,210) a year" for the service, according to Mr Pratt. Waitrose is searching for an ad agency to develop an online campaign for its services.

Home at work
Spar Handels AG, a German grocery chain, is looking at building small food stores on office premises, and British Telecom has invited small retailers to set up shop in office foyers. All of this is part of a larger trend termed "homing at work" by market research company Henley Centre, which recently completed a study showing that more than half the adults in the UK conduct personal tasks at work, and the numbers are growing. Mr Martin Hayward, director of consumer consultancy at Henley Centre, says "homing at work" is a relatively new phenomenon that advertisers and retailers are only just beginning to recognize. "In most workplaces, people have always tried to make themselves more comfortable by bringing in photographs or surrounding themselves with plants," says Mr Hayward, "but creating the environment of home and actually conducting home-related activities at work are two different things."

The shift will force advertisers who want to reach the working public to develop online campaigns that effectively mimic offline campaigns that office workers see on their free time. "You don't really have enough time to develop a new relationship with someone while he or she is at work,"

explains Mr Hayward, "but you do have time to capture someone's attention with a brand or logo they have already seen."

As a result, brands will become even more visually arresting and iconographic than they already are, and company names will continue to shorten, he says. These marketing trends aren't solely attributable to capturing people's attention at work, but they are linked to the fact that consumers have less and less time to devote their attention to choosing brands or products. "Getting them at work is just part of a competitive advantage," says Mr Hayward.

The Wall Street Journal