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• Dave Scott on the Advantages of Marketfish Over Groupon

  December 17, 2011 0 Comments

  One of the major challenges for small businesses is generating awareness for their products or services. You need to compete with major corporations that have a virtually limitless marketing and public relations budget.

  Dave Scott, founder and CEO of Marketfish addresses this disparity by offering a 100 percent self-service automated marketing solution for companies to select a target demographic at affordable rates, and launch a customized e-mail or direct mail marketing campaign. The company has been successful thanks to Scott’s award-wining background as manager for AT&T Wireless and General Electric. Rolling out spoke with Scott about the benefits of his company’s approach to increasing exposure and revenue for small businesses.

  One of the issues in your industry is lack of transparency. How does this service improve that issue?

  In my industry today, there are a lot of list marketers who rip off their customers by offering bad mailing lists or by lying about the kinds of marketing campaigns they are sending on the advertiser’s behalf. The Marketfish platform allows advertisers to learn everything about a mailing list before executing a marketing campaign. This way, the advertiser knows exactly what they’re buying.

  Does your company offer ways to target people via social media instead of just email or direct mail?

  Today, our platform only offers marketing via email or direct mail tactics. However, by coupling an email campaign with an ongoing social media program, we can drive thousands of people to a brand or cause. Email is a very flexible channel, allowing you to reach millions of people, making it quite easy to use email marketing as a tool to drive interest in your social media channels. I see the two mediums working together, not standing in opposition.

  How does your company level the playing field to help small businesses target potential consumers?

  Small business owners can leverage the Marketfish platform to target over 200 million marketing records using 100 filters such as household income, age and even boat ownership. These businesses can then use those filtered records to create their own Groupon. Simply build a highly targeted mailing list and then launch an email or direct mail offer. You can do all that without ever leaving the Marketfish platform. Think about it, if you offer boat loans, which would you prefer? To offer a Groupon or to target 10,000 boat owners who own boats greater than five years old?

  Read full article and comments here.
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• Digiday Datapop article

  December 16, 2011 0 Comments

  Don’t Diss the Click by Jason Lehmbeck

  When I first cut my teeth in the online ad industry back in the go-go '90s, I had the opportunity to see up close the rumblings of the first online ad civil war. One camp of revolutionaries, I call them the Impressionists, wanted to apply the old model to the new world. The other camp, the Clicks, began with the assumption that the old ways were toast. In those early days, the idea that Clicks would lead the initial wave of ad industry disruption wasn’t even a consideration. Most industry luminaries thought that Clicks were beneath the mighty ad industry. In fact, they were quite certain that clicks would kill advertising. Turns out they were a wee bit off. Impressions dominated the '90s for a brief spell before the big bubble burst. Since then, Clicks have ruled as the primary metric for online marketing despite the persistent efforts of an army of Impressionists. After a few years in the wilderness, though, the Impressionists are back with a vengeance restating the case that ad impressions should regain their rightful place as the go-to metric for online marketing. They state their case in sometimes hyperbolic ways. A case in point is this recent Digiday article, ”The Web's Dangerous Click Addiction.” My favorite quote in the article -- and the most telling -- comes from true Impressionists, Evolve Media’s Aaron Broder: “People that click on ads are losers.” It’s as if the last 10 years were a $10 billion mistake. The underlying reasons why Clicks won round one points to why the Clicks' camp and its new friends (shares, likes, etc.) will win in the next. But before we go there, it helps to learn from the first battle.

  In my time at DoubleClick, I witnessed the first battle up close and personal. At one point in the late '90s, I was privy to a fascinating debate at DoubleClick between the Clicks and the Impressionists who worked together in a relatively peaceful but highly segregated way. The Impressionists made a pretty dramatic and ultimately flat-out wrong assertion during a discussion about whether we should buy a hot new Clicks company. The gist of their argument was that cost-per-click and click-through rate would be the death of the online ad industry. At that point in time, Impressionists ruled the day. Sure, you'd see a study or two touting click-through rates, but ad inventory was largely bought and sold the way it always had been: on a CPM basis. Clicks were relegated to the ad industry equivalent of Siberia. In fact, at DoubleClick, that was literally the case – the Clicks team (including ad innovator Mike Walrath) was sent to another building, which happened to not include the fancy outdoor basketball court and spectacular soda display case. I wasn't smart enough to realize at the time that the Impressionists' Armageddon statement about Clicks would become so categorically refuted, but it did seem a bit overblown at the time. What the Impressionists missed completely was that Clicks would become the foundation of a $10 billion-plus explosion in online advertising.

  Read the full story here.

  Jason Lehmbeck is CEO of DataPop, a search marketing firm. Follow him on Twitter @jasonlehmbeck.
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• CarWoo Raises $6 Million To Spare You The Car Dealership Blues

  December 16, 2011 0 Comments

  "CarWoo streamlines the car buying process by flipping the traditional model on its head."

  Buying a car doesn’t have to be such a nightmare, after all.

  That’s the promise of CarWoo, a startup that looks to take the stressful negotiation tactics and pushy salespeople out of the equation, allowing consumers to buy their car online with a relatively small amount of hassle. Today the company is announcing that it’s closed a new $6 million funding round led by Interwest Partners, Comcast Ventures, Blumberg Capital, and Raymond Tonsing. The company has now raised over $12 million in total, after a $6 million round last year (it was also part of the Y Combinator class of summer 2009).

  In conjunction with the news, the company is announcing that it’s landed a new COO: Rudi Thun, who was previously the GM of AOL Autos, the fourth biggest online car site (Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by AOL). This is a significant hire for the team, as the core team of founders didn’t actually have any experience with cars when they first started the company. They say that’s served them well up until now, but it was time to bring someone onboard with extensive experience in the space.

  CarWoo streamlines the car buying process by flipping the traditional model on its head. First, users head to the site, where they input the make, model, and trim of the vehicle they’re looking for. Dealers who have signed up with CarWoo can then compete against one another for that customer — naming their price (which the customer can counterbid on), and answering questions as well. So what about test drives? CarWoo CEO Tommy McClung says that a lot of people go to a local dealership to try a vehicle out, then head online when it’s time to actually buy the car.

  McClung says that the company has managed to quadruple the number of dealers using the service in the last year alone — they’re now at around 11,000 dealers nationwide. And while the company doesn’t disclose how many vehicles it’s sold, he says that the site attracts a large enough userbase to make the site worthwhile for those 11,000 dealers. Another interesting trend: while price is obviously a factor as users decide which dealer they want to work with, McClung says that most of the time users wind up choosing a dealer who didn’t offer the absolute lowest price. This, he explains, is because there are other factors involved: customers prefer dealers who are more responsive, professional, and so on.

  CarWoo makes money in a couple of ways. Consumers wishing to search for three or more car models at once pay $100 (there’s a new, free plan that just launched that lets them search for one car at a time). On the other side of the equation, dealers can list their vehicles and complete transactions for free. The site recently launched a premium ‘Dealer Plus’ option that lets them pay to receive advanced analytics — which are designed to help them compete on those aforementioned factors that can help decide who lands the customer.

  Read full article and comments at TechCrunch.
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