On Sunday, One Kings Lane will launch a national television-ad campaign for its online home-furnishings store. The ads will run on ABC's Revenge in primetime.
The company didn't reveal its budget, but such ads typically cost $100,000 or more, and it plans for the campaign to continue into next year and expand into print ads, too.
Veterans of the first dotcom boom get the shakes whenever they hear about an e-commerce company running television ads.
That's because of pioneers like Pets.com, which ran TV ads featuring an outlandish sock puppet, only to see traffic to its website actually decline.
But that was well before most consumers had gotten comfortable with using credit cards online and before they'd installed broadband at home.
One Kings Lane and other e-commerce companies operate in a far different environment—one where many TV viewers watch with an Internet-connected smartphone or tablet in their lap.
In August, One Kings Lane saw 25 percent of its sales come from mobile.
So it's far easier to drive TV viewers online than it was a decade ago.
Even Twitter's running TV ads these days.
Fab.com, another online housewares vendor, recently ran a $1 million test of TV ads in limited markets.
Here are two of the new ads, produced by Wieden & Kennedy and centered on the theme that "design is never done."
Sharp-eyed fans of One Kings Lane will note that the company's elephant symbol makes a cameo in both spots.
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