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MEET THE MEMBERS - TRANSCRIPT Daytime
Drive Time - Sponsored
by: Interactive Marketing Tips- Summary - Transcript in PDF Format Baltimore, MD (March 3, 2004) PENNY LEWANDOWSKI: We are here today because of our sponsor, Stout, Causey & Horning, P.A. It is my pleasure to introduce Michael Young, one of the eight directors in the Mid-Atlantic area for Stout Causey. Mike serves businesses in diverse industries, including retail, distribution, manufacturing, not-for-profit and professional services. In addition to traditional audit and tax services, he has helped clients achieve their business objectives by performing special projects such as: planning for mergers and acquisitions; development of corporate objectives and strategies; development of proposals to obtain bank and equity financing; business valuations; and fraud investigations. MICHAEL YOUNG: Good morning. We're very happy to be a sponsor of the Meet the Members program this morning, as well as being a sponsor for the upcoming Meet the Member series. We've been very pleased with this event. We think it's a fantastic opportunity for technology companies to network with peers in their industry, as well as to learn from the successes and experiences that others have gained. Stout Causey & Horning is a large locally based accounting firm in Hunt Valley. We have approximately 180 employees, including 160 in Hunt Valley and 20 scattered across the country in Houston, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Virginia. Based on the most recent available data, Stout Causey is the 77th largest firm in the country and the fastest growing firm in the top 100. We attribute this success to our positive culture and our ability to offer our employees an accelerated career path, which allows us to attract some of the best and brightest people in the field. This enables us to provide the highest quality and responsible service to our clients. We look forward to continuing our partnership with the GBTC. Thank you. PENNY LEWANDOWSKI: Our moderator this morning is Michael Teitelbaum, president of Eisner Interactive. He has been in Maryland since 1995 helping organizations develop and implement effective Internet marketing strategies. Prior to Eisner, he started one of the largest direct mail advertising companies in the Mid-Atlantic region. Michael has also been a long supporter of the GBTC. He was co-chair of the Business Growth Committee during its inception. He helped us launch our series of round tables and our GBTechNet Group. And, Michael was the first recipient of the GBTC Connector Award at TechNite. MICHAEL TEITELBAUM: Good morning. To begin, I would like each member of our panel to describe what they do. MITCH ARNOWITZ: I am managing director of Tuvel Communications, the online communications firm. Tuvel helps companies and organizations find qualified customers and supporters. Prior to Tuvel, I helped create Washington, DC's Netpreneur program. At Netpreneur, I led email marketing and branding efforts. Before that, I developed the advertising program for the Internet's first department store, Cybershop.com. JOHN FERBER: I am co-founder of Advertising.com, one of the world's leading interactive marketing services organizations. We focus on web display advertising, e-mail marketing, search engine advertising and affiliate marketing. Our clients range from Microsoft and Wal-Mart to some smaller entities, such as dry cleaners. So, the Internet truly works for companies of all sizes. GREG CANGIALOSI: I am president of Blue Sky Factory, an e-mail service provider. We help customers build relationships with their clients and help businesses acquire new customers using the e-mail channel. We do this through full and self-service technology offerings for ad agencies, PR firms and direct clients. Our clients include, Eisner, Carton Donofrio, Under Armour, Honeywell, and many Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies. We assist with their e-mail marketing communications needs. SEAN CARTON: I am the chief experience officer at Carton Donofrio Partners. We specialize in advertising, web development, interactive marketing and anthropological research. We're one of the largest anthropological research companies in the country. MICHAEL TEITELBAUM: In many respects, interactive marketing is in its infancy. Yet, it has come a long way since the days of the dot.com bust, which was filled with unproven business models. Interactive marketing was one of the ways that these companies tried to gain traction. The papers and magazines state that interactive marketing is on the rise. They predict double-digit increases over the next five years. Why is it growing so fast? JOHN FERBER: Because of the concept of addressability. The Internet provides the ability to know exactly how every cent of your marketing dollars is expended. GREG CANGIALOSI: It is growing so fast because it is highly measurable. It is the only basic medium that you can see your performance on a campaign almost in real time. SEAN CARTON: The last statistic I saw, interactive marketing is considered the top daytime medium. You can reach people pretty much anywhere. And, it is probably the only way to reach people at their desktops during the day. MITCH ARNOWITZ: People are realizing that it's a great way to build a relationship with your customers and prospects. MICHAEL TEITELBAUM: Tracking and measurability are really important. At the end of the day, if the results of the campaign didn't prove itself, then who is going to continue advertising? In addition, you can really efficiently and effectively target an audience that you are going after, whether it's seniors, teens, or people with special interests. The Internet is known primarily as a direct response vehicle because is accountable and capable of measuring results. However, there's a whole contingency of people who are saying the Internet can be used as a branding vehicle to create awareness and positively affect public perception about your company or organization publicly. Where do you see it? Is it a branding vehicle or direct response vehicle, or is it somewhere in between? SEAN CARTON: A lot of it depends on how you buy the media and how your creative works. For direct response, you need to do things like elicit direct responses from people. For branding, you can do things more generally and speak to the feel of your company. It can also work against you. You can end up with a bad brand if you annoy people with irritating advertising. Everyone knows the X10 Camera. They recently filed for bankruptcy because their type of advertising irritated people. MITCH ARNOWITZ: I don't think your branding and direct marketing efforts have to be mutually exclusive. We're working with a company that develops software to manage networks. On one hand they have to brand the software, because people aren't familiar with it. But on the other hand they need to target network engineers in the federal market and sell them an expensive product. GREG CANGIALOSI: It's basically all of the above. My area of expertise is e-mail space - its strategic, tactical, retention of loyalty, branding and awareness. It covers all the gamuts. We've done campaigns that cover all of these silos, and we've seen them be effective in every single one. SEAN CARTON: There is plenty of research to back up the fact that the Internet does work as a branding vehicle. Depending on what your creative is like, it may not matter if people ever click on it because they're being exposed to your brand on a regular basis. GREG CANGIALOSI: I would also like to emphasize that you can have the best list in the world or the best subject line, but if you don't have that creative backup to invoke the response with a branding impression, it's useless. MICHAEL TEITELBAUM: The four basic components of interactive marketing are search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, web presence and online display advertising. Online display advertising has been known as banner advertising. Online display advertising has gone so far from the original banner that we're trying to change the terminology. All of this interactive marketing eventually gets people to your web presence, but how does that close the loop on your interactive marketing strategy? Let's begin our discussion on search engine marketing. First, there is search engine optimization, which is an opportunity to optimize your search result listings by optimizing your website and submitting to the search engines. Hopefully your web site will work its way to the top of priority in terms of search engines organically without paying for it. There are other opportunities to actually pay your way to the top, typically paying on a per click basis. In addition, Yahoo just released a pay inclusion option, which means you pay for the search engine to give your link more attention What are the dos and don'ts about search engine marketing? Any tips? JOHN FERBER: Search engine marketing is the most popular and probably one of the fastest growing of the four segments Michael mentioned. One reason is that it requires a minimal investment. You can get started for $25.00. Google has a self-serve program that can be up and running in 15 minutes. I would recommend this especially for a small business in the local environment. It is great quality, but a downside is that you cannot get enough of it. That is what we hear our clients say over and over again. The two biggest providers in the paid or sponsored category is Overture, which was acquired by Yahoo, and Google. They both provide very comparable programs with similar type of self-service environments. Overture takes more time to set up, so I generally recommend that people start with Google since people are anxious to see the results right away. SEAN CARTON: It is probably the one place where you are going to spend a lower amount of money online that you can have a lot more bang for your buck - especially if you are on a small budget or a locally oriented service. And, it's a very high quality lead because someone is actually searching for your type of company in Baltimore. MITCH ARNOWITZ: Also, think about what you can do to your own web site or web presence to get listed in the search engines. An example is the search engine spider - they index the web and look for web sites that have a lot of inbound links. They look at the titles on your pages. Constantly refresh or update your content to get a better appearance in search engines. JOHN FERBER: Web Edition Gold is a good software program to help you with this process. It costs a few hundred dollars. You can also hire a company that will charge you a few thousand dollars, to help you. It's relatively technical and if you're a novice you would probably want to hire a company. SEAN CARTON: It can take up to six months to really affect your position on Google or Yahoo. It is not something that will happen overnight. You have to work at it and be patient. GREG CANGIALOSI: We have been trying national searches. For example, on Google we are on the 10th or 11th page even though we have all the tags, content and our copy is strategically placed. On the flip side, we are one of Google's at-work customers. We started in January. It has been working out well - we can target people searching for specific things like e-mail marketing, rich media e-mail or geographically located based e-mail marketing providers. You can start with your daily budget and bid. We set it at $20 and go up from there. You compete with your other competitors on a cost per click basis. From a success story standpoint, we get a nice handful of leads every day from qualified people who are looking for this product. MICHAEL TEITELBAUM: So, it seems that the most immediate opportunity for response is doing sponsored search. How do I make sure that when my search listing appears I'm more likely to get qualified prospects clicking? If I am paying on a per click basis, how do I avoid unqualified prospects? JOHN FERBER: The ad copy is an interesting point. You have approximately 100-150 characters to express your message. With Overture, you dictate how much you want to pay per click. The performance of your ad and response rate isn't factored into your position, so you need to pay the most to be number one. Therefore, you need to make your ad copy as descriptive as possible. For example, if you are selling something, then do not include the word free in your listing. You want to quantify your customers as much as possible at that point. Google actually takes your response rate into consideration. That is how they determine your position. It's response rate multiplied by credit. It becomes tricky when you need to choose every single word very carefully to ensure that you draw qualified customers. Google lets you change your creative 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which allows you to perform a lot of tests. Overture is a manual editor review process. Therefore, every change takes about 2-3 days. We generally do a lot more testing on Google and once we determine what's successful, we'll extrapolate it over to Overture. GREG CANGIALOSI: We test various creatives and different key word searches on Google for a month. We were looking for people inquiring about e-mail lists, which turned out not to be good leads. So, we removed those key words from our searches and optimized our placement. MITCH ARNOWITZ: For local search opportunities, Verizon is one of the big Yellow Book providers. Verizon mentioned that they are coming out with a pay per click model to the consternation of their print sales force. However, Google, Yellow Pages and Overture are offering some nice local opportunities. Let me tell you a quick story on the power of key word advertising: I own a new business, so I needed a federal ID number. I Googled it and the top, sponsored listing said - "get your federal ID number for $10 in 10 minutes." I went through the application and at the last screen I was instructed to call the IRS for my number. I called the IRS the next day and asked them - How many people pay $10 to get this number that they can get for free on the IRS web site? The IRS said not many - most people pay $16! Then, I realized the power of key word advertising. MICHAEL TEITELBAUM: With sponsored search, you can specifically measure results down to the cost per lead or cost per transaction to the key word; not so with search engine marketing in general. You know which words are working for you and producing the lowest cost per lead or transaction, which enables you to optimize your campaign. SEAN CARTON: Google charges a minimum of $10,000 if you want them to monitor it for you. MICHAEL TEITELBAUM: Online display advertising - banner ads, big box ads and skyscrapers. It comes in all shapes and sizes, static, and flash (moving graphics). Then there are the pop-up and pop-under ads. Sean, you mentioned pop-up ads could actually adversely affect branding because of the annoyance factor. How do we generate the most impact without annoying consumers? SEAN CARTON: That is more of a complex question if you are looking at generating qualified leads. Pop-ups and pop-unders do work. They do generate a response, which no one can dispute. I don't think there is good research on the larger aspects of what happens to the brand over a long period of time. If you are trying to generate a lot of response quickly, then yes pop-ups work great. However, Earth Link, AOL, etc. are going to develop new versions with pop-up blockers. Most consumers are annoyed with the pop-ups. That is not saying they don't work in some sense. JOHN FERBER: The good news - pop-ups will go away sooner rather than later. The bad news - they will be replaced with something almost identical. Why are pop-ups so prevalent? We released a study last year. They're about 13 times more effective from an efficiency standpoint than other forms. Companies like Orbitz drive the most sales in the least amount of time. Web display advertising was the first arguable interactive medium designed. There was a lot of bad press about its efficiency in the late 90's and early 2000s, but the rate is declining. They are actually incredibly effective. I am sure you are thinking right now that you have never clicked one. However, I bet if you check your computer for Advertising.com you all have a presence. With web display advertising, you can splice and dice the media. One element is the concept of geo-targeting, the precision of which you can reach 28,000 unique points in the United States, about 40,000 zip codes. If you're a local business, TV or the newspaper may be too expensive to you in relation to your business area. If you're a lawyer who practices in Catonsville, you may not want to advertise on the other side of town. We can pinpoint the regions you want with elements like SIC code. In the past, larger companies with significant budgets generally used display advertising. Today, the price point has decreased, so it is much more realistic and can provide true value for even a smaller-sized company with a smaller budget. We have a self-serve system. You can go there and literally in five minutes, buy and have an advertising campaign started. So there's also an incredible level of efficiency. If you have ever placed a local ad, you know there are a lot of negotiations. You have to wait days for it to go live. So, there's the immediacy and efficiency of being able to do it yourself. Local advertising in the offline world is about 50 percent of all ad dollars. Internet is only about 80/20, 80 percent national. It's quickly reaching that medium. To further Mitch's point, local is becoming the big new topic. Even Google and Overture are providing more local solutions for small businesses to become more prevalent and visible on the Internet. SEAN CARTON: It is not just a display ad like a newspaper. You can engage customers; create flash-based things that can be little web sites unto themselves. You can put a form in there to capture lead information without sending someone back to your web site. They don't have to click on it. They can actually interact with it, find information about the company, fill out the form, and the lead you receive will be more effective. If they interacted and engaged with the ad, then they are really interested in the product. There are a lot of new formats and ways of reaching people. GREG CANGIALOSI: How the finances are constructed and presented online, I think, serve the ad more effectively. For example, media is bought on a CPM basis (cost per thousand), CPC basis (cost per click) and CPA (cost per acquisition). You can sometimes pay only for what is working for you versus buying 50,000 impressions and hoping for the best. SEAN CARTON: It is also time for everyone to get used to this new way of advertising. There will be a point in time where you will be able to have addressable television advertising directly to people. For example, if Comcast is watching your viewing habits you may only see commercials in your demographic area. It is interesting to see that kind of model of real accountability, measurability and tractability throughout all kinds of advertising. MITCH ARNOWITZ: To further Sean's comment about not using the banner just for image building, technology companies are using banners to push people to webinars, download white papers and take software trials. Banners are great lead generators. Whether it's your online advertising, e-mail marketing or traditional advertising - it is important to integrate your marketing. All of your messages should speak the same language - you should deliver the same message in all mediums. MICHAEL TEITELBAUM: The first step with any advertising campaign, whether it's online or offline, is defining your company's objectives - what are you trying to achieve? Everything fits within that objective and then you measure against it at the end of the campaign. While we can track impressions, clicks and conversions on the back end, we can also track view-based conversions. Advertising.com does this. Someone didn't click, as Sean mentioned, but they saw your ad. Just by viewing the ad, we can track how many people actually had a conversion on your web site without ever clicking on your ad. JOHN FERBER: For example, if you pass by a billboard and saw an ad for Budweiser and then you went to a liquor store and bought it, we have the ability to know that. So, why is the Internet so hot - it's the ability to track. MICHAEL TEITELBAUM: Let's discuss e-mail marketing now. There's solo e-mail, meaning your message alone. There's inclusion of your advertisement on other people's e-mail, which could be a newsletter. A good example is travel news, where you can get the best deals in travel and your company can be contained within that e-mail. There's e-mail for new customer acquisition purposes. And then e-mail for loyalty and retention. We will also touch on the spam issue. GREG CANGIALOSI: We break it into two categories: customer loyalty and customer retention, which includes online newsletters, product announcements - transactional based e-mails. And then the customer acquisition side - where your acquiring new customers by driving traffic to your web site by using partners' mail lists, a third-party or a list publisher that you are renting on a CPM basis. Ask the question - why e-mail marketing? The reason why I recommend e-mail marketing is that it tends to come at a lower cost, and it's quick to set up, easy to display and highly responsive. You are developing a one-to-one relationship with your recipient. The response is usually taken within 48 hours. It is highly measurable. I don't know of any other medium where you can send out a campaign and have a good baseline understanding within 48 hours. E-mail marketing is very technically enabled as well dependent on your level of expertise or complexity you want from your e-mail. There are software products and solutions to fit every budget. Most importantly, it is hopefully permission-based and expected. People are hoping to receive an e-mail from you so you are not spamming. MICHAEL TEITELBAUM: How do you cut through the clutter, because everybody's e-mail box is filled to the brim? How can you identify your e-mail as something that people actually want to open? GREG CANGIALOSI: We call it heat. The components of an e-mail campaign include: the from line, subject line, the list and the creative. There is also, what we call, the delete factor. You have literally a split second to make that determination between your message versus all the clutter. Spend a lot of time on the subject line and most importantly - deliver value in the e-mail. Do not send people things they are not interested in. You have to deliver value all the time to keep people interested and prevent them from opting out. It is very important to keep your list clean. We call it list hygiene. You want to make sure you handle everything in accordance with the CAN-SPAM Law that went into effect January 1st. Keeping your list clean prevents you from having a high bounce rate on your e-mail campaigns, which sometimes is the threshold that causes filtering and blocking on some campaigns. There are a lot of practical things you can do to make sure you differentiate your message from the rest of the clutter - things like frequency and timing. You do not want to send a campaign on a Monday or a Friday. Send between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Monitor the frequency of your mail. If you send out a monthly newsletter, then people only want to hear from you once a month. Know your audience and cater to them. You do not want to saturate them. SEAN CARTON: One of the most important things Greg said was about value. There are e-mail newsletters that you probably read every morning. And then there is all the other crap. By providing valuable information, people are much more likely to open it and return to it. GREG CANGIALOSI: You can have the most robust technology or subject line, but it really boils down to the value of the content and creative to invoke that user response and action. You also need to focus on the length of the e-mail. Keep it short and sweet. Less is more. If it is a newsletter with articles, do a little summary. SEAN CARTON: A lot of times people think an e-mail newsletter is like a print newsletter that they may send out quarterly. They spend a lot of time obsessing over it. In reality, it should be something more frequent, shorter and more to the point. JOHN FERBER: If you don't do any e-mail marketing, then I definitely recommend you look at the retention and communication with your existing customers first. Practice only double-opted marketing, which means when someone gives you an e-mail address, you send them an e-mail asking if they want to hear from you again. They have to click on the link or hit reply. That will significantly reduce your complaint rate. And, you know these people received your e-mail, so it's not going to their spam filter. In regards to the acquisition side, people do respond to them at the end of the day. It's incredibly cost-effective.
My brother, who came from Capital One, used to mail out 100 million direct mail pieces a quarter and it took him three months to find out how successful it was. In e-mail space, before those 100 million pieces of mail even make it to the printer, I can send out all 100 million emails and have the responses back. I can do it in about 100th of the cost of what a traditional mail piece would cost. So, there is obviously a cost factor there. In January, a federal law called the CAN-SPAM Act was passed. It was designed to help protect both consumers and businesses. It was rushed into legislation and wasn't necessary carefully crafted. The point - be safe and make sure you are not breaking the law. Again, double opting is probably the safest way. Do your due diligence when you rent other people's list. Unfortunately, there are a lot of unscrupulous activities and methods through which some of these e-mails lists are generated at. Sometimes you may have gone to an online discussion board, and then someone developed the technology to spider through there and grab your e-mail address. Therefore, do your due diligence - ask for references and make sure the company is reputable. Understand how the list was generated, who owns it and what are the rights to market these people. Shop around. There are a couple of good companies. For instance, Navion, which is owned by Equifax, is a very reputable company. GREG CANGIALOSI: Any list publisher should be able to back it into the source. Red flags should be raised if you cannot get that information or qualified data card on a particular list. MITCH ARNOWITZ: Join your own list. You want to see the list and see what your subscribers are receiving. It is always better to build a house list than to acquire it. Whenever you have an opportunity to drive folks to your web site, grab some information and get their e-mail address. MICHAEL TEITELBAUM: Web presence. Most people think of it as a web site. In fact, many companies have multiple web sites. Other companies create special landing pages that are attached to an advertising campaign. Any thoughts on web presence? MITCH ARNOWITZ: It is a good idea to have interactivity on your web site. Again, back to e-mail marketing - ask the customer. Solicit feedback. Post a survey or contest. The Internet allows you to build a relationship and interact with your prospect or customer. JOHN FERBER: Definitely have elements of interactivity. You have 30 seconds to get your message across clearly, including the time it takes for your web page to load. Be direct and to the point. We have a lot of clients who have a very elaborate web site. What do they want to accomplish? They want to generate a lead. So, don't do a campaign and take them to the home page where they have 17 links. Take them specifically to a page that says - who we are, fill out the information, we'll get in touch with you. Be very direct and cut out all the excess. SEAN CARTON: Let people know what they are supposed to do when they get there. And, put your contact information on the web page. Also, it is not television. Flash intros are so 20th century. Please do not use them anymore. Just make it easy for people to get there and figure out what they are doing. If it's your corporate site, make it a resource for your customers, not just an event that they come to once in a while. Give them value. AUDIENCE: Do you advise sending both an HTML version and text version in an e-mail? GREG CANGIALOSI: Absolutely. It's standard practice to do that. Only one to two percent of the people will receive the text version. Most people will receive HTML. It is best practice to cater to the lowest common denominator of e-mail clients. AUDIENCE: John mentioned with any new campaign you should see your click-through rate diminish over time. Is that the same with an opt-in e-mail type campaign? JOHN FERBER: You always have diminishing returns over time with anything you do. A lot is creative driven. There are ads that have been shown billions of times. So over time everything loses its efficacy. GREG CANGIALOSI: In terms of retention marketing and loyalty, as long as you're providing value, it depends on the creative. AUDIENCE: Has there been documentation in terms of what percentage is now being spent on advertising budgets interactive versus traditional? JOHN FERBER: The U.S. advertising industry is roughly 200 to 300 billion dollars a year. The Internet space is approximately seven to eight billion dollars of that. It's about four percent. It's the fastest growing medium of all advertising right now. AUDIENCE: When people hit your web site, can we capture their e-mail? JOHN FERBER: They have to provide it. Sometimes you visit a site and they can actually sniff it from your computer. But I'd never recommend doing business that way. MICHAEL TEITELBAUM: It goes against all of the privacy policies we're trying to abide by. AUDIENCE: If I have a V card or a signature block card, message from clients who I email frequently will bounce back. Is there an easy solution? GREG CANGIALOSI: There are many different filtering technologies. It seems like there is more software products against proper deliverability than there are people emailing. There are filters that work on a threshold - say you have a particular word and it hits a scale of one to five, anything above a 3.5 is flagged and automatically spammed. So is e-mail faced with challenges? Yes, it is. If you have tracking reporting in your e-mail campaigns you can see which e-mails are bouncing back. You will then know who you have to contact manually. SEAN CARTON: There are other channels to start thinking about - instant messaging and RSS, which is a way to feed content into a news reading application that does not go through e-mail. A lot of people are starting to migrate their newsletter from e-mail and the web to RSS because there are now spam issues involved. JOHN FERBER: The blocking issue is a headache for everyone. If you are using a mass mailer service, look for a company called White Listing. Our company is white listed on AOL, MSN and Yahoo, the three largest e-mail houses. Therefore, we have a guarantee that our e-mails will go through. GREG CANGIALOSI: Maintain relationships with all the major ISPs, AOL, Yahoo and all the web-based programs. If you are doing e-mail marketing, you need to be with a provider who has those relationships in place and are white listed. AUDIENCE: On the customer acquisition side, what is the favorite message you've received and why is it your favorite? GREG CANGIALOSI: A travel offer. AirTran got me as a customer because they sent me a nice e-mail with a really good offer. I need to travel for business and I've since used AirTran. SEAN CARTON: I prescribe to the U.S. Air list because it is valuable. It saves you money. It's fantastic because it's of real value versus just some promotion. There are plenty of newsletters I subscribe to that don't really have anything to do with direct offers. MITCH ARNOWITZ: Issue advertising. SEAN CARTON: The commonalities are timeliness and value. I've switched most of my subscriptions over to RSS because I have tons of stuff in my e-mail I can't find because it's buried in the spam. MITCH ARNOWITZ: You should check RSS. Anytime you see an orange XML button, its an RSS feed. You can go to Yahoo or CNN and they will offer you an opportunity to download a free newsfeed. It is spam-free because it goes from the web site directly to your computer with no opportunity for Spam. Some e-mail marketers are complementing newsletters with RSS feeds. The really simple syndication or RSS solution is a way to get the word out. SEAN CARTON: There is a news service that will translate your newsletter to an RSS for free. MITCH ARNOWITZ: There is a technology publisher in Washington who found people weren't opening his e-mail and reading his newsletter. He's going to put an RSS syndication feed on his web site to complement his regular newsletter push to get more people to read it. AUDIENCE: With the huge emergence of the handhelds and trios, what changes do you see in technology in terms of strategy on web sites, e-mails and structures? JOHN FERBER: Europe and Asia have adopted more mobile marketing approaches than the United States. People thought text messaging on phones would be popular, but it never picked up in the U.S. I have a trio in my pocket with a web browser that looks and feels like a front of a computer. So, what you're seeing is a conversion of what we traditionally looked at as web-based forms of advertising. I see the banner ads and can respond to them on my phone just as I could on a computer. The carriers do not want to commercialize text messaging because of churn rates. The five cents they make per text message is nothing compared to the $2000 a year they make from your phone bill every year. I believe you won't see a lot of cell phone spam. As these devices emulate more, you'll see a natural evolution of marketing. It is not a big arena. I would not look into it now. Things like location-based elements will be popular, but it is still several years off. Don't worry, you're not going to pass by a McDonald's and have your phone chirp. SEAN CARTON: Most research found that consumers hate mobile marketing. Ringing cell phones and test messages are far higher on the hate scale than pop-ups. It was hyped a lot three years ago. And the Wireless Marketing Association is defunct - it only last a year and a half. AUDIENCE: We discussed a lot about the mechanics of interactive marketing. How about the contributions on the creative side? Last year at TechNite, we had a great presentation from Seth Godin, author of "The Purple Cow," and is the champion of viral marketing. How do your programs fall into viral marketing? How are you going to stand out from everyone else who is doing the same type of interactive marketing over the Internet? SEAN CARTON: It's not about the technology. We have two great examples - John and Greg. They have great products. It's the brains behind the technology that make it work and it's the creative that drives it. That is what it comes down to for long-term effect. MICHAEL TEITELBAUM: And in that regard online is no different than offline. It starts with understanding company objectives, developing a sound strategy, and then implementing that strategy. SEAN CARTON: I think it is crazy when people go to a programming company to have their web presence created. It is like going to a printer to have your advertising created for you. It doesn't make sense. You should have someone who knows how to do the creative and then get the technology to make it happen. MITCH ARNOWITZ: Seth Godin is right - it's not the technology. It's about people. This past year, the politicians have taught us best practices in marketing your brand online. Take Howard Dean. What did he do? He enabled his most passionate supporters to become product evangelists. They pushed his message, which was fund-raising. It really wasn't about technology, although he used great technology in his web site, e-mail and offline efforts. It was about connecting folks and then tracking results. He was using online marketing to drive offline action. And look at the results. PENNY LEWANDOWSKI: This is a perfect example of how tech goes to tech and tech goes to traditional. Everyone in the audience should have come away with something at least to think about and how they're going to change their marketing plans. In the early days, many people in the traditional industry did not understand the dot.com and Internet boom, thinking it didn't concern them. The decline reinforced their idea that Internet didn't include them. This panel is evidence that this is not true. The medium is here to stay and is thriving. People who think otherwise will be so far behind the train that they won't be able to get on the tracks, let alone on the train. At the GBTC, we've learned to make your web developer your partner. The panel made a great point - do not go the programming company to get your web site done. Really be the person who drives your content - what it looks like, who you are reaching, who is your market. Don't expect your web developer to figure that out. Also, we do not have the money to do a creative every time we send an email. But when we do a creative, we do something that really pops and is direct. Thank you for coming.
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