THE Web offers companies an unprecedented opportunity to get closer to their customers - but there are risks.

Technological advances in online tracking allow companies to tell where Internet users are surfing, said Internet giant Google's vice-president for Asia-Pacific and Latin America operations, Ms Sukhinder Singh Cassidy.

This means that companies can customise the type of online advertisement each user gets, depending on his location.

For instance, instead of displaying a generic advertisement boasting of its top-notch shirts, a clothing chain that knows where the user is surfing can instead display an ad highlighting promotions on offer at the store closest to him.

Ms Singh, who is based in the United States, spoke from the sidelines of the Global Entrepolis conference at the Suntec Convention Centre on Tuesday, where she was one of the speakers.

She said companies looking for marketing opportunities have yet to exploit fully the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and Friendster.

A sports goods firm, for instance, could build a voting application that allows sports fans on social networking sites to vote for their favourite sports personalities. Such applications, she said, work as a highly effective branding tool.

A truly brave organisation willing to take some risks could reap even greater rewards, she said.

Earlier this year, food company Heinz invited tomato sauce lovers to upload home-made television commercials about why they loved the condiment onto video-sharing site YouTube.

The saucy hook: Heinz will pay for an ad campaign featuring the best home-made video. By the time Heinz stopped accepting entries in August, it had attracted more than 8,000 entries, from monologues to animated cartoons. It is launching a follow-up campaign starting next month.

While this was a runaway success for Heinz, a similar campaign by a carmaker was an unmitigated disaster: It got a host of sarcastic video 'commercials' mocking its cars, instead of the bouquets it expected.

For now, she said, companies not prepared to handle such 'honesty' can stick with safer, more traditional online campaigns.

But the day will come, she warned, when companies will have no choice but to deal with the 'challenge' of such an 'uncontrollable' medium, because the next generation is a 'very vocal, very tech-savvy' one.

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