Until recently, consumer packaged goods marketers and health care companies were among the few advertisers not to move substantial portions of their budgets online. Scott Meyer, CEO and president of About.com, is doing his best to change that. During an Advertising Week chat in his fifth-floor office in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, Meyer explained how the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) Company-owned unit is working to capitalize on the increased spending from those segments “as the web evolves into a branding medium, as opposed to a direct response medium.” Meyer: “You don’t sell drugs directly online; you generally don’t sell boxes of Tide online… [but] as a branding medium, those marketers are embracing the internet wholeheartedly. And that’s why, if you just look at the CPG numbers, it’s estimated, in a couple of years, to be over $1 billion in just that one category.”

Meyer has just made two hires designed to help bring some of the money to About. Former Reader’s Digest associate director Kim Huey Steiner has been tapped as strategic sales director for CPG. To reach out to health care and pharmaceutical advertisers, About has chosen Michael Frick as strategic sales director, health. Over the past 20 years, Frick has handled ad sales for companies such as ImpactRX and WebMD (NSDQ: WBMD). (More details about the new hires in the Release” title="release">release)

But About has an image issue of its own. Meyer talked about some of the ways he’s trying to sharpen About’s diffuse image among marketers, who tend to see it as a generalist guide site (”We’re the second biggest health site on the web - people wouldn’t know that,” he said). We also discussed how targeted acquisitions such as UCompareHealthCare.com and Calorie-Count.com have helped increase ad revenue this past year.

The recording of our conversation is here (7 MB, 17 mins).

• Earnings: NYTCO Execs Focus On Mobile, Online
• About.com Expands Health Content With Purchase Of UCompareHealthCare.com
• About.com Acquires Calorie-Count.com