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Web Folks Aren't "Nice"
In 1997, I met the man behind Cantin Advertising on a hardware service call. Don Cantin was slick, he was stylish, he had oodles of big time Madison Avenue experience with clients like Sony, Gulf, Levis, Atari, Clairol, Club Med - and he became my very good friend. Don was a bit of a legend on Cape Cod, and some of the things he had to say to me during those early years of KISS Computing - "The clients are privileged I'll work with them," "I wouldn't return a phone call without a retainer," "Whatever I charge, it is worth it, as I make millions for my clients" - left me more than impressed. You couldn't help but idolize the old man a bit. |
Don and I started doing some work together for his clients on web site projects - and he referred to the sales pitch we developed as "The Geezer and The Geek Present..." We had fun and sold a number of websites, but mostly we had a good time challenging each other's intellect - me attempting to explain the web and technology, and Don attempting to explain traditional advertising and the ad agency world.
Of all the things Don said to me over the years, there is one that really captures the essence of a traditional ad agency: "About 25% of what we do is the actual work, another 25% is looking impressive while we are doing it, and at least half of the job is convincing the client that all this advertising is actually doing something."
Ad agency folks are nice - so nice it is almost scary - and the business reason behind it is that the strength of their customer relationships is the single most important factor to their success. The ad may have worked, and it may not have - there is no way to really tell, anyway - but what the client thinks happened is what is important. Lunch was a lifestyle with Don, and many of the noontime meals I had with him stretched past dinnertime.
Don - a master of his craft - really knew how to please clients who believed in the old cliché, that famous John Wanamaker quote: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." The geek in me did have some fun explaining the parallels between this and what Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says about physics, but that's another newsletter. This bit of Wanamaker wisdom became a "truth" in marketing and even today many folks hold on to it and desperately wish it were still true.
By comparison, web folks are just jerks. They're rude, they have no sense of a schmooze lunch or style - and that's mostly because they have no need for it.
The age of fully measured advertising is here. If your web professional is overly nice, consider it fair warning that they probably don't know what they are doing.
The first time I shared a report with Don Cantin showing how many people had visited the site of his client, where they came from, what kind of computer they had, what they clicked on, what percentage of them bought products based on what search engine they came from - he knew he was cooked. "I'll be dead before it happens but this is going to put us right out of business." (Rest in peace Don. While I'm sure you are right, it hasn't quite happened yet).
Measurable marketing is ruled by people who are good with a spreadsheet - pluggers who know how to test, measure, and refine. Your web folks will produce at least as many bad ideas as a traditional advertising agency, but 60 days later we'll all know they aren't working.
Recently we've seen lots of press about pay per call services like Ingenio - these are the folks who will place your ad on AOL with their toll free number that redirects calls to your office. You pay only when your phone rings. In combination with Pay Per Click, these services continue to emerge, and they are amazingly powerful. Newspapers continue bleeding to death, print guides struggle, and competition increases, and we all are amazed at the revenue that keeps increasing quarter after quarter in the online world.
The key for website owners is not simply to be aware of how the web generates measurable and proven results, but also to think about what principle you are using to judge your advertising. Is it Wanamaker's "best guess" concept or is it a boring but effective spreadsheet?
I know it might be hard to envision a day when those nice ad agency folks go away, but it is coming. In the meantime - take those web profits and go buy yourself a fancy lunch. Oh - and maybe give the not so nice web folks a break. After all, they are generating direct sales. |
