Ads Please,
Hold the Spam
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (DECEMBER 2003)
With
a lively turnout of more than 5,000 attendees and 130
exhibitors, Ad:Tech New York was officially,
in the words of conference chair Susan Bratton,
“the most exciting Ad:Tech show in three years,” affirming
its reputation as the go-to trade show for Internet
marketing. As for the vibe on the floor, the 40 panels
and keynotes at the Hilton New York early last month
ran the gamut, with most folks looking to improve their
e-mail campaigns as customer-retention devices, optimize
search engine results, and expand affiliate marketing
(more on that below). In one highly touted moment, Patrick
Keane, Google’s head of sales strategy, introduced
the not-so-new concept of a “self-funded search campaign,”
which demonstrated that for most search campaigns the
immediate sales results far outstrip the costs, making
them “self-funded,” or what is usually called “profitable”
without even requiring metrics like lifetime value.
Sadly, the much-anticipated “Blogging for Business”
panel ended as the show’s nadir. What an intriguing
idea — weblogs aiding marketing, community development,
and “thought leadership,” and perhaps even making money
— but the session was crimped by technical snafus and
personal site promotion.
Spam was, of course, everywhere — but as the battlefield
web marketers have to fight through to get results.
Probably the most radical experiment in that department
came from veteran web guru Jim Sterne, on hand
to flog his new book, Advanced E-mail Marketing.
Tackling reader inertia head-on, Sterne recently dumped
all 5,000 recipients of his free e-mail newsletter and
asked them to resubscribe to continue receiving it.
Only 2% did. “What you have to realize,” as David
Lewis of Digital Impact pointed out, “is
that permission is not persistent. You must get ‘memorable
permission.’” By this he meant an ongoing relationship
with a consumer. But that’s getting trickier, as many
Internet service providers now make no distinction between
unsolicited marketing messages and legitimate mail that
has actually been requested. If a marketing message
from a company gets branded as spam, e-mails paid for
by subscription from the same company won’t get through
the blockade. (Some web publishers now send from two
IP addresses: one for premium service and one for promotions.)
The ultimate challenge to marketers is to get into the
recipient’s e-mail contact list, outsmarting the likes
of AOL, which now disables images and links of
any e-mail from a sender not snugly in the recipient’s
address book. Brush up on e-mail marketing strategies,
plus get a free 11-page white paper, at www.gaspedal.net.
Other sessions revealed the booming business of affiliate
marketing, which can rack up 30% of sales, according
to James Crouthamel, CEO of Performics,
one of the few affiliate marketing specialists. Affiliate
sites typically win a bounty for delivering traffic
to a marketer’s site. The burden of cutting small checks
and 1099 forms to these companies, however, leads many
web publishers to hire third parties to manage their
affiliate programs. Check out www.affiliatemanager.net
for up-to-date info on affiliate marketing tactics by
an active affiliate marketer.
And for real nuts-and-bolts material, several panels
discussed “natural search engine marketing,” which boils
down to optimizing your web site for two critical audiences:
first, the automated search engine spiders threading
back keyword data that delivers your traffic when someone
queries “chick lit” on Google, and second, the human
eyeballs that should ideally follow. Ed Shull,
CEO of Clicksquad, offered numerous tips: “Optimize
your site for Google,” he said, “and it will work for
the other search engines.” Shull also noted that Google
can’t read Javascript, Flash, or images, so make sure
your keywords are embedded elsewhere (like in the image
“alt tags”). In looking at online traffic metrics, Jim
Sterne reminded everyone that those search-engine spiders
are doing some damage of their own: you’ve got to remove
traffic generated by spiders before analyzing your site
usage data. As one media company participant confirmed,
his staff found that 60% of their pageview traffic was
being served to robots. For more information on search
engine strategies, click on www.did-it.com/news.php#articles
for pithy articles on the topic by Kevin Lee,
CEO of Didit.com.
We thank business writer Rich Kelley (richkelley@nyc.rr.com)
for contributing this report.
©2003
Publishing Trends
