Seattle Geek Dinner with Hugh McLeod
Farecast.com … here I come!
Hi Everyone,
Today, I formally accepted the position of Senior Marketing Manager with Farecast.com, a Seattle-based travel startup which is the first and only site to predict airfare prices for almost all major US markets based on a database of BILLIONS of historical pricing data points.
I’ve enjoyed and treasured my time at Avenue A | Razorfish and am looking forward to bringing my experience in online marketing to Farecast.com to grow the user base and spread the gospel about why Farecast.com rocks.
I’ll post more updates in the coming weeks and you can definitely expect this blog to be much more active as I start writing about my experiences there.
In the meantime, “Know When to Buy”, when it comes to airline tickets by checking first with Farecast.com!
3 Confessions of an Online Marketer
Darius over at YoungGoGetter.com has written up a piece about the online advertising market with some good information about common ways advertisers and publishers measure the value of their site. He also talks about some ideas that have been proposed for measurement such as Return on Influence as well as an idea to raise the CPM floor in order to discourage “crappy” advertisers from inundating the public with annoying ads. This combined with a shitstorm of negative comments from people on Digg and Reddit on Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick has proved to me that there is a high degree of misunderstanding about online advertising and how advertisers choose where and what to advertise.
First, some disclaimers, I’m speaking only from my personal experience with major brand-name clients. I’m not talking about your 2nd tier dating site or your sleazy mobile phone ringtone provider. What those guys do, I have no part in. But I can tell you this… whatever it is they’re doing, it’s working. At the end of the day, you have to remember that these companies are running a business and if the advertising isn’t generating a positive ROI, they would have pulled it a long time ago. There are articles about how LowerMyBills.com’s crazy ads generate a really high click-through rate and conversion rate - annoying ads often are effective and that’s why they’re everywhere you go online.
Confession #1 - Snake Oil is Out - Stuff you Want is In
It may be hard for you to believe this, but we really hate trying to sell things you don’t need to you. Seriously, why would any smart advertiser waste money on advertising something that you probably don’t want? The truth is, we try to be smart about targeting our advertising so that you get relevant products and messaging. We do this a lot of ways including looking at what types of sites you’ve visited as well as any type of demographic/geographic data we can figure out.
Confession #2 - We Value Privacy - Tracking is really NOT Evil
This is what gets me boiling. You go on Digg, read the comments, and you always have your 10-20 people who start screaming about “blah blah cookies, spying on me.. blah blah .. conspiracy”. Believe it or not, our clients and us have very strict privacy policies for data collection online. In our system, your computer is nothing more than a randomized number which eventually expires. We don’t identify people, we identify machines and we try to get to some type of profile which helps us figure out what type of ad you would want to see and respond to the most. Most of the data we’re most interested in is actually just whether or not you’ve visited the advertiser’s website. If people would stop freaking out about cookies, you’ll probably get a lot more relevant and useful ads as opposed to totally irrelevant random ads.
Confession #3 - We Want You to LOVE Us
Smart advertisers are not out to sell you but to win your love. We’re not up in some ivory tower thinking about how to bombard you with ads. We actually are thinking about tools, content, and ways to help you. The days of mass advertising are over, we’re trying to engage in dialog now with every consumer. We’re looking at feedback and we’re finding ways to make engaging with our brand worthwhile and valuable to you.
Hopefully, you’ll find that online marketing people are not out to destroy the web as you know it. Advertising plays a very important role online — it’s called generating the revenue that pays the salary for your favorite online writer and it also pays for the servers and the bandwidth. There are definitely a lot of very very bad advertising out there, especially on sites that have low barriers to entry. I suggest that you stop clicking on them if you want them to go away. The business of advertising dictates that if it doesn’t work, drop it. Also, stop freaking out about legitimate 3rd party cookies and tracking because it’s anonymous and is only done to make sure you get ads that make sense. I’m sure everyone can agree on that.
Audi A5 - I’m in Love with this car
Besides a Maserati, I don’t think I want any other car more. I can’t wait until it comes out this fall. If possible, I may try to pawn off my Accord, pay off the loan, use the rest against a down payment against this baby.
Whew.. just came back from an almost 2 mile run @ 1 AM
So last night, I ran the GreenLake Loop which is about 3 miles and tonight I was on the verge of not running but a last minute project for work came up and I thought “what the hell, I’ll get it done tonight” so I went out for another run around Queen Anne at around 1AM.
I ran past Paragon when I ran into a group of people leaving the bar and all of a sudden a drunk girl starts running besides me and starts drunk-chatting about how she’s visiting her sister in Seattle and she just graduated from RISD in architecture and how she’s hoping to find a job. She kept up for about 3 blocks which was amazing since she was in full blown “going out” clothes and shoes and had a big red purse over her shoulder. In any case, it was an interesting distraction. Wherever you are, good luck with your job search!
Here’s the route I did tonight:
Customer Reviews - What’s So Scary?
Although customer reviews on e-commerce websites are almost the norm today, many major sites still don’t allow for customers to submit reviews of their products and/or some stores filter reviews before they are published onto the site.
Studies have shown that adding customer reviews is a great way to increase conversion rates and provides value to the customer in the form of testimonial advice. Among different information sources, a recommendation word-of-mouth is considered the most important and trustworthy according to some studies.
In speaking to many industry insiders, I’ve come across a few key problems that retailers have to customer reviews which I have listed below:
- Vendor Relationship Management - Some retailers don’t like the idea of having negative reviews of any specific vendor’s products which can both affect sales and hurt the vendor/retailer relationship. At the same time, vendors may often pressure retailers to moderate/change reviews to put them in a favorable light, especially if they have limited exposure to selling online and/or tactics and best practices surrounding customer engagement.
- Expert/Authoritative Positioning - High-end and specialty retailers often build their brand and image around offering only the best products & services available. As such, all products that they carry should be “5 stars” and the cream of the crop, the idea that customers would rate them otherwise may undermine the idea that they are the experts at choosing products. These companies feel that they have to protect their status and image and believe that although customer reviews would be beneficial to other customers, it would hurt their brand-value and differentiating factor in the long run.
- Resource Management - All reviews need some sort of moderation system to weed out SPAM, obviously biased or fake reviews, as well as the occassional rude/irrelevant feedback given to a product. Many retailers just don’t have the manpower to moderate the feedback, especially on high traffic sites.
All of these reasons are understandable but I would urge retailers to consider the following benefits and guidelines surrounding creating working customer review systems: (Examples and Guidelines are taken from evaluating the customer review systems on Newegg.com, Amazon.com, as well as 3rd party feedback systems such as Bizrate, Pricegrabber, Shopping.com, and ResellerRatings.com)
Suggestions for Building Working Review Systems
- Incorporate vendors into your commenting system - Your suppliers and vendors should be looped in from the beginning in making sure that they can provide honest, accurate, and timely repsonse/feedback to customers who comment and review their products on your site. Doing so improves both the image of the vendor and your company and is a win-win situation. Gone are the days when companies can ignore feedback from customers, it’s time to embrace and respond, lest they want to end up on Consumerist.com.
- Moderate - It’s not censorship, it’s quality control, not content control. Some mild form of moderation should be employed to ensure that fake/immature reviews are edited (with disclosure) or prevented from being posted. In fact, if you suspect a post is from a competitor or is outright outlandish, you should contact the reviewer for them to edit their comment citing the reasons their comment was rejected.
- Leverage group-enabled content creation - Reviews are often rich sources of unbiased and expert opinions and reviews and as such can become valuable and free content for your site. Take advantage of that and make sure you incorporate the “ROI” from free content in determining whether or not your company has the resources to support a customer comment/review system.
Hopefully, I’ll start seeing more sites with reviews. Let me know if your company starts incorporating reviews and how it goes!
Avenue A | Razorfish Digital Outlook 2007
Avenue A | Razorfish released their 2007 Digital Outlook analyzing trends in online advertising spending, media consumption, and user behavior. There are lots of great insights here (disclaimer: I work at AA|RF) that is worthwhile reading for any online marketing professional.
Some Interesting Trends:
- Search spending as % of total budget decreased attributed mainly to boosts in brand advertising (display banners, sponsorships, etc.) - Could Search be hitting a peak in spend? Have advertisers already exhausted their keyword lists and has search engine usage plateaued?
- Yahoo! and AOL are firing on all cylinders for display advertising (heavy revamp of Yahoo! properties has helped) but also reflects a continued decline in billings for Search (Panama is helping a bit)
- The Digital Class Key Findings:
- Human-computer interaction is about to get intense
- The network is ubiquitous
- There’s no middle
- The Internet is where general interest goes to die
- Information seeking equals entertainment
- Transparency is king
- Social networking ascends to utilitarian status
- Let’s stay friends
- Giving back is good
- Dust is settling on the music library
- Blogs have yet to achieve media brand status
- More mobile phones, less talking
Of particular note that I’ve touched upon several times on this blog about the causality of view-based conversions.
From the 2007 Outlook:
View Based Conversions Study
