Ads Target Wired Students.

College students may annoy neighbors and whoever's in charge of forwarding mail at the post office, but those transient citizens are sweet gems for Internet marketers.

For one, they're wired. Jupiter Communications estimates 92 percent of the 12.5 million college students are online (www.jup.com). As a group, they control $120 billion in discretionary spending annually. Also, they're impressionable.

"Marketers pay special attention to this group because, when you leave your family for the first time, you're establishing a consumer household," says Raymond Sozzi, president and chief executive of Student Advantage. "Those loyalties and purchasing habits that you're starting to build could last a lifetime."

That's why American Express (www.americanexpress.com) and Visa International (www.visa.com) go hog-wild when it comes to signing up students who'll do anything for a free T-shirt. The hope of building a long-term relationship is also why General Motors (www.gm.com) became a sponsor of CollegeClub (www.collegeclub.com), a community site being acquired by Student Advantage. CollegeClub has about 2.9 million registered users at 3,600 college campuses.

Student Advantage is primarily a membership program that charges $20 per year and offers discounts from companies like Tower Records and Foot Locker. Many of the company's 2.1 million members also log into its student-centric portal (www.studentadvantage.com) and the numerous official college athletics sites the organization runs. Those sites offer additional advertising opportunities, Sozzi says.

The Boston company has particularly impressed its partners, Amtrak (www.amtrak.com) and Textbooks.com. The train company's national marketing director, Linda Park, describes the alliance with Student Advantage as "the most successful consumer-targeted marketing program" Amtrak has. The affinity program both companies created over the past five years now generates nearly 3 percent of Amtrak's annual passenger-related revenue.

Textbooks.com, meanwhile, uses Student Advantage to brand itself through different marketing strategies, such as college newspaper advertising campaigns and sponsored campus events.

CampusEngine.com takes a different approach; it sells national and local advertisements for 80 student-run campus Web sites. The company sees itself as the "single point of access for all advertisers for the college market," according to CEO Jack Crawford Jr.

CampusEngine staffers also visit each participating school and help students expand their school newspapers into portals with services like instant messaging and classifieds. The Folsom, Calif., company shares in the advertising and e-commerce revenue generated from the school portals.

Many large schools use agencies to grab national advertisers, but it's the portal package that interests schools like Indiana University. "I do envision this being a benefit for advertisers because we want more of our student body going to the site, not just to check the news but to check games, auctions, chat rooms and other things we didn't have on our site," says David Adams, publisher of the Indiana Daily Student, which has been online for five years. Expanding site offerings translates into stickiness, if done correctly.

Streaming media provider iBeam Broadcasting offers advertisers a chance to reach students via some of today's most popular youth sites. The company inserts ads into the content it streams from providers such as music hub Launch.com and AtomFilms.

IBeam uses fiber optics and a satellite broadcast to deliver content to servers located on school networks. The handful of schools using iBeam, such as Bucknell University and Georgia Tech, view the service as a welcome alternative to music distribution service Napster, which has congested campus systems with its bandwidth-intensive file-sharing program. IBeam's stream doesn't cause traffic jams.

For advertisers, the company's targeted ad insertion program offers a unique way to reach a specific demographic. Local car dealerships can offer streaming ads in the same way that national brands can promote a college lease package. "These ads offer the brand-building ability of broadcast, but you can also capture all the interactivity of the Internet, like the ability to know who watched the ad and get a response," says Tom Gillis, senior vice president of media at iBeam (www.ibeam.com).

Gillis says the company saw a 10 percent surge in traffic during the first two weeks of school.

Advertisers who reach students through School Sucks (www.schoolsucks.com), which has a search engine for term papers, learn an important lesson from founder Kenny Sahr. "Talk to them at eye level. Be brave. Lots of ads look like they're going to make [your company's] board of directors happy, but I would. hope my board of directors wouldn't like the ads."