double POSITIVE Marketing Group, Inc.

Post By
Casey Cook

Let’s take a look!

YouTube launched its “Educational Hub” recently and I was fascinated.  If a fish swims in water, my fishbowl the last 10 years has been education and the internet.  I first heard about the YouTubeEDUHub when Sean Fenlon sent me a link with the suggestion I blog about it.  If I’m going to blog, then the first thing I need is an acronym.  To simplify things YouTubeEDUHub is now YTEDUH.  That’s better.

I start reading YTEDUH.  It said, “Do you EDU? Education Hub (YTEDUH) Launches:  Using YouTube as a vehicle to democratize learning is one of the coolest, unintended outcomes of its existence.”   Huh? What does that mean really?  I better do is look up the word “democratized.”   Merriam Webster says:  “To make democratic.”  Fantastic.  Helpful.  Ok, I better look up democracy:

1.       a: government by the people ; especially : rule of the majority

         b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people

2.       a political unit that has a democratic government

3.       capitalized : the principles and policies of the Democratic party in the United States

4.        the common people especially when constituting the source of political authority

5.        the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges

I imagine from these definitions that the YouTube folks are leaning towards numbers  4 and 5 above and that the goal for YTEDUH is to eliminate roadblocks for education.  Undergirded in this desire is the premise that currently at least some education is reserved for those with money and privilege, and those that don’t have access to cash have limited options.  Ok, so now I get it.  I don’t agree 100% but I get it.  I went to an Ivy league school.  Most folks were wealthy.  A minority of folks were there on a scholarship at a discounted or free rate (As a side note, everyone was cold at Cornell).  I do agree that not all qualified people could go.  It was expensive.   On the other hand, many of my friends went to more economical state schools and got incredible educations.  The really smart ones did so in very warm weather.  

So far I have concluded that a great education can be expensive, but it can also be reasonably priced (whatever that means). 

This brings me to the real question that has been bouncing around in the halls of Washington (what does that mean?) and scaring many of the for profits and perhaps some not for profits that love profit as well.  Should the price of education be regulated or even free (free as in the sense that in Sweden education is “free”)?

This is an emotional issue.  I feel the rising tide of concern on in the for profit world.   Here is my take.  I’ll tackle this from 4 angles: 

1.       Washington DC

2.       The For Profit Educators

3.       Education vs. Accreditation

4.       The Big Boys

Washington DC:  It is no secret really that the currently administration and the democratically controlled congress is not a friend of for profit education.  Take this sentence.

“Oil giant Exxon posts biggest profit ever. “

Now change it to,

“Education giant ________ posts biggest profit ever.” 

How dare they do such a thing in a recession?   Somehow profit has become a bad thing.   There is pressure from Congress on the for profit EDU providers.  Most of this pressure comes from Title IV (student loans) concerns.  It is true that the for profit educators benefit from government backed student loans.  Let me present the issue from business week’s perspective.

Here is a link to a businessweek article attacking University of Phoenix: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_12/b4124020629165.htm

Here is Phoenix’s well written reply:

http://www.upxnewsroom.com/_downloads/UPX_Businessweek.pdf

I must point out that the writers of the Business Week article, Ben Elgin and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, are graduates of University of California at San Diego and Princeton respectively.  I assume both of these schools lower their costs whenever they can (especially when their endowments grow to 15 Billion dollars or so). 

Will education be nationalized?  I don’t think Cornell, Princeton or UC San Diego has anything to worry about quite yet.  I think the target here are the for-profits.  Would our country be better if all the for-profit EDU companies didn’t make as much money (and thus employed tens of thousands less people)? 

 One of the great ironies here is that the for-profit EDU companies educate those that the traditional universities cannot accommodate.  The single Moms, the working adults, those that want or have to go to school and work (and quite possibly not want to fight the customer service black hole of many community colleges).  The last I checked only 17% of college students go to 4 year traditional campus based schools.  For reference, that stat came from my memory.  For accuracy sake, please note that the 17% is probably wrong, but very close.  Most students don’t spend 4 years on a campus, living in dorms.

During the last few weeks, we’ve seen a “merger” of private companies and the US government, not by anyone’s design or desire.   Let’s contrast AIG or the auto industry with what we see happening in education.  Here is an example of the government and private industry working together for the common good.  The government is providing loans for students and entrepreneurs in the proprietary EDU world are providing the education.  People who never before could get an education, now can.  This is a win win.  Maybe even a win-win-win, or a tri-win…… right?

The For Profit Educators.  I just mistakenly closed out of YTEDUH.  When I googled it, it took me a second to find it again.   What came up made me laugh out loud.  A news site listed a short description of YTEDUH along with a link.  I was about to click the link to take me to YTEDUH when I saw the ad underneath,  an ad from the University of Phoenix!  See the irony here?  The purpose of YouTube’s EDU hub is to make education accessible to all regardless of societal class.  The internet’s major financier over  the past 10 years has been University of Phoenix.  YouTube is at least partially supported  by a yield management ad model  system, a model based on making the most money possible. 

IMHO, this is worthy of more commentary.   The Phoenix ad says, “Become a Phoenix.”   What does that mean?  Click and find out and you are given the stories of many who had no opportunity to get an education if not for this big bad for profit.   UOP even says that they serve the “under served.”  Brilliant. 

For real brilliance take a look at this new commercial put out by Kaplan University, courtesy of…… Youtube.   Warning you will get goose bumps!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e50YBu14j3U 

On one hand the thought is education ought to be accessible and free for everyone.  Big profit bad.  On the other (hand), because John Sperling, founder and chairman of the Apollo Group (APOL), had the wisdom and entrepreneurial courage to start a company, he has educated hundreds of thousands and employed 10’s of thousands over the last 30 years.

True, he has made billions, and bravo to him!  Here is where the irony here gets even tastier.  Mr. Sperling, a man who I greatly respect is openly and outwardly very left leaning politically.  A quick google will fill you in on all his leanings.  But instead of fighting the red ocean of education 30 years ago, he created his own system.  He felt a social responsibility to educate those who were historically left out, the single mom’s, the blue collar folks who could only go to school at night and he did so by starting a business (a for profit).   

How did he go about it?  He didn’t propose a duel between himself and the President of Harvard.  He didn’t try to bring others down.  He started his own company, way out deep in the middle of the blue ocean.  Many probably laughed when they saw him building out there in the middle of nowhere (remember the movie Bugsy when Warren Beatty paints the picture of a vacation paradise in the middle of the desert?).   Mr. Sperling knew where the demand was.  He started very practical programs, and because of him 100’s of thousands of students have bettered themselves, students who couldn’t be serviced by the traditional schools. 

Here now is the proverbial cherry on top.  Mr. Sperling came from poverty (capital P) and lived the American dream.  He is a fighter.  He is an entrepreneur.  His once small business is now valued well over 12 Billion dollars (US Dollars).  It’s funny how everyone is all for small businesses owners…. until they become big business owners.

I am a fan of University of Phoenix.  In full disclosure I worked with them when I was Advertising.com for nearly 8 years.  I even architected an exclusive deal between University of Phoenix and Advertising.com.  It didn’t last and I don’t work with them anymore.  My past relationship gave me insight to their model and I have a great respect for it and for the dozens of other for profits making education better.

Education vs. Accreditation

So where is education going, really?  Will it be offered free online via YouTube?  My answer is that education, when defined broadly has always been free.  We’ve gone from readings in the public square to books to tapes, to cd’s to DVD’s to Podcasts.  There has never been a cost to join a library, and gain access to most information.  Personally  my family has a family pass to Port Discovery in Baltimore.  It is $50 bucks for the year.  We went Saturday (10 million kids running around unsupervised).  Very reasonable, and subsidized by Baltimore City.  Good for Baltimore.

And I believe it is fantastic that we can get on YouTube and see great lectures from MIT and Stanford. But here is the kicker:

Education without accreditation is still education, but I’d call it learning.  Access to learning ought to be free.  A smart kid from the rich suburbs or inner city could watch every lecture MIT offers for free and learn just as much as students on campus but…… he/she will not have the diploma from MIT and their accreditation body.  That brings me to the last and final question:

Will one of the Big Boys Jump In?

Will Google or MSFT buy one of the for-profit or not for profit universities?  I believe the answer to the first question is yes.   And I predict that this will happen sometime soon (or maybe a little after that).

Will they “democratize” that university, slash the prices and or make it free?  I believe the answer to that is no.  Why?  Simply for the same reason that Google sells clicks, and MSFT sells Microsoft office.   

The critic in me also believes that the same people that don’t want the big for profit EDUs to make a profit would most likely not give any credibility to a degree that could be obtained from a university that was free.  “You went to GoogleU? Well isn’t that nice.” 

Washington DC (on both sides of the aisle) is still run for the most part by the Northeast (educated in) elite. 

15 years ago I imagined a world where the average college student would spend one year on campus, one year online, one year abroad and one year in a work co-op program.  The error I made was that I put these 4 years in silos, with the student progressively jumping from one silo to the next.  The interwoven student is here now.  The fabric of education is rich and the opportunities are growing.   I now imagine a student living anywhere in the world, going to any university in the world, and working at any company in the world, all at the same time, and all the while sharing the world through facebook and twitter (and drinking red bull, blogging, and doing all this in real time, or at least Jack Bauer real time).  Hopefully this student will also post his/her thoughts on YouTube, for free.

Cc

Ps.  I know you didn’t really watch the Kaplan commercial. Take a look http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e50YBu14j3U

 

Post By
Sean Fenlon

First “Carpool Confession” ever:

http://blog.leadcritic.com/featured/carpool-confessions-with-joey-liner-of-doublepositive

Great ideal, Mike.

Great job, Joey.

SPF

Post By
Sean Fenlon

 

Twitter-eports?

What about drilling deeper down into Twitterlytics?

We should all setup TwitAlerts as soon as they are available (under any product name).

I’ll contribute the first Twittereport here (to the best of my knowledge – all data I used is available online):

URL of Twitter Account	Followers	Friends	Updates	Joined	Follower /Friends	Followers /Updates	Friends /Updates
http://cnn.com/	695,940	0	684	27 months ago	0.0	1017.5	0.0
http://www.britneyspears.com	632,754	78,048	103	6 months ago	8.1	6143.2	757.7
http://blahgirls.com	603,806	58	1,120		10410.4	539.1	0.1
http://www.barackobama.com	571,885	501,983	265	25 months ago	1.1	2158.1	1894.3
http://twitter.com	560,270	30	296	26 months ago	18675.7	1892.8	0.1
http://www.latenightwithjimmy…	501,854	79	748	9 months ago	6352.6	670.9	0.1
http://www.nytimes.com/	455,682	80	29,667	25 months ago	5696.0	15.4	0.0
	449,295	491	1,044	4 months ago	915.1	430.4	0.5
http://www.livestrong.org	449,185	45	1,303	6 months ago	9981.9	344.7	0.0

Cool to be the first manual twitter report, but I suspect this will be all app-driven sooner-than-later. :-)

SPF

Post By
Joey Liner

DoublePositive and Leads360 are pleased to announce the industry’s first joint webinar.

Both DoublePositive and Leads360 are value added partners that are a true extension to the sales force. We work together on dozens of mutual accounts and thought it would be a great idea to host a webinar to go over our services separately as well as congruently.

Each company will give a demo of their service and explain in detail how we can help your sales team get more out of the leads you are buying.

About Leads360:
Leads360 is the market and technology leader in Web-based customer acquisition and lead management solutions. We enable buyers and sellers of consumer Internet leads to achieve unparalleled return on investment. Our clients can realize maximum lead value through our purpose-built technology, success-driven training, highly responsive support team, and superior intelligence surrounding lead performance. Leads360 currently manages more than 12,500,000 leads and serves over 500 clients in the most competitive business-to-consumer industries.

About DoublePositive Marketing Group, Inc.

DoublePositive Marketing Group, Inc. was founded in late 2004 with the specific purpose of bridging the “last mile” of converting traditional (data-only) leads into sales. More primitive versions of marketing provide leads to sales professionals in data form, requiring sales professionals to work through the data themselves in order to find a genuinely interested and genuinely qualified consumer. DoublePositive has evolved the model of lead generation so as to provide sales professionals with a live, qualified, and interested consumer, along with the consumer’s data, all in real time. DoublePositive primarily serves clients and lead providers in the mortgage leads, online education enrollment leads, and insurance leads industries.

Click here to register:
DoublePositive & Leads360 Webinar

Post By
Sean Fenlon

INTRO

===================

I guess this process of writing a blog post on the plane ride home from LeadsCon is becoming somewhat of habit for me.  The coverage of LeadsCon from last year’s plane ride is here.

Let’s start this year by expressing genuine respect and admiration for our friend and LeadsCon founder, Jay Weintraub.  Many of us have known Jay since his days at our neighbor Advertising.com – almost ten years ago. 

I was one of the fortunate few to learn about the inaugural LeadsCon (2008) from Jay via instant messaging back in 2007.  I LOVED the idea.  But that’s just the point, it was just an idea.  Now that LeadsCon 2009 is complete (with over 1,300 attendees), we can reflect and see that Jay has created a successful and valuable franchise from scratch.  As a fellow entrepreneur, I am always inspired to see people I know create SOMETHING out of NOTHING.  This is what Jay has done.  Acknowledging and honoring the creation of something out of nothing is the highest compliment I can pay a fellow entrepreneur.  The success of this franchise is evident in the announcement of a SECOND LeadsCon for 2009 in New York.  Count us in, Jay! :-)

LeadsCon filled a major void in the tradeshow landscape for those involve in online performance-based adverting/marketing, and he did what the best entrepreneurs do – he solved a problem.  The Ad:tech franchise has become too saturated/diluted (ask anyone who has attended a recent Ad:tech show and the word “ZOO” will invariably come up).  TARGUSinfo has been presenting a high-class summit now for three years running, but the spirit of their event is more limited in scope to just that of TARGUSinfo customers/partners. 

The evidence of the need for LeadsCon can be witnessed in the echelon of attendees.  Founders and CEO’s and senior managers (and even several board members) attend and even man the exhibits rather than the customary booth bunnies.  Another aspect that makes LeadsCon so special is the effervescent spirit of deal-making.  People came to have fun and to do deals.  There was certainly plenty of both taking place.

We witnessed these characteristics of LeadsCon in the first show in 2008 and I immediately “got it.”  I reached out to Jay soon after and predicted growth of the franchise by orders of magnitude in the years to come and I also wanted shore up our position as a significant sponsor, exhibitor, and promoter of the event.  DoublePositive stretched even further for LeadsCon 2009 (we were a sponsor in 2008 as well) by sponsoring two Workshops on Hot Transfers – one for lead buyers and one for lead sellers.

Please keep in mind that as usual, I played the role of a CEO with his tradeshow-biz-dev hat on bouncing from deal-making-conversation to deal-making-conversation out in the lobby, but I tried to attend at least a substantial portion of each of the general sessions.  But please don’t be upset by holes in the reporting.

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Wednesday, March 4, 2009

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KEYNOTE: TRANSFORMING CONSUMER INSIGHTS INTO MARKET OPPORTUNITIES

Presenter:  Dan Ariely, Behavioral Economist, author of bestselling book “Predictably Irrational”

The choice of Dan Ariely for the Keynote address to LeadsCon attendees is a testament to Jay’s mature wisdom in tradeshow architecture.  Last year’s keynote address was delivered by former Experian Interactive CEO, Ed Odjana – a great and “obvious” choice for the LeadsCon audience.  At first blush, however, the choice of Dan Ariely – a Behavioral Economist at Duke University – may not to appear as intuitive.  Oh, but it was!  Ariely is the author of best-selling business book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.

Firstly, let me say that if you have not already read this book, you should.  I read this book twice and I found it incredibly thought-provoking and wildly entertaining.  Ariely’s case studies on human behavior are outrageous and shocking.  It ended up shaping many of my own business decisions (we actually developed a $150 Hot Transfer mortgage product using his premise of “price anchoring” – all of a sudden, $89 doesn’t look so high! :-))

Jay very intuitively saw the correlation between lead generation and the many various aspects of Behavioral Economics, which made the choice of Ariely as the keynote brilliant.

The majority of items presented by Ariely were indeed topics covered in his book.  However, there was some information presented that was not, including a shocking study about how people feel about their significant others.  The question was presented:  if we setup two groups of people and asked the first group to list 3 things that they loved about their significant other and asked the second group to list 10 things that they loved about their significant other, which group would have stronger feelings about their significant other on the other side of the process.  The audience was roughly split with their collective guesses to the answer, but the real answer was the group that listed 3 things felt stronger feels about their significant other after the process.  It may seem counter-intuitive to some (such as me), but it turns out, the group that listed 10 things typically ran out of things to list around 6 or 7 and then began to think – “How can I possibly love this person if I cannot even list 10 things that I love about them!”  Hilarious.

As a side note, I was watching CNBC in my hotel room while getting ready the next morning and ironically, there was Dan Ariely appearing live as a guest commentator on “Squawk Box.”  The hosts were asking him to describe how consumer behavior might change in a down economy.  Ariely was his typical brilliant self, but the jackass host Mark Haines threw him under the bus by asking “Mr. Ariely, you have a degree in BEHAVIORAL Economics, I trust you also have a degree in ‘regular’ economics.”  Ariely replied, “No, actually my other degree is actually in Psychology,” to which Mark Haines quipped his jackass response, “Oh god, then we’re ALL in trouble.”  What personally I find fascinating about Behavioral Economics is that it can be tested
in a laboratory, something that cannot be done with “regular” Economics.

 

STATE OF THE INDUSTRY

• David Carlick – Director, ReachLocal, Inc. (Moderator)
  
• Ross Sandler – Senior Analyst Global Internet & Media Research, RBC Capital Markets
  
• Doug Valenti – Chairman  & CEO, QuinStreet
  
• Michael Zeisser – SVP, Liberty Media Corporation

This was a somber panel discussion, to say the least.  It appeared difficult for the discussion to stay industry-specific in nature and tended to drift more towards the general macro-economic climate.  Not surprising – after all the global economy is the elephant in the room.  There was a lot discussion, however, surrounding the evolution and transformation of the vestigial (advertising) agency model and their “cost-plus” style pricing models.  Apparently, the layers of agencies are actually growing (i.e. Ad Agency –> Interactive Agency –> Search Agency, etc.), which is a recipe for disaster.  I find it interesting that this appears to be an extremely industry-specific discussion within the lead generation world.  Those in the Mortgage and Insurance industries I don’t believe work much within this model, but those in the Education and Automotive industries are knee-deep in it.

I did key in on something I believe Ross Sandler said during the panel – something to the effect of “You know, it’s funny.  EVERY business I speak to these days amazingly describes themselves as a ‘counter-cyclical’ business.”  As a biased founder who has certainly colored many a pitch to align to the winds of the day, I laughed at the line as much as the other folks in the audience.  However, I actually DO think there might be something to that notion, at least with respect to the LeadsCon constituency.  With the exception of the Mortgage vertical, most players in the leads ecosystem seem to be doing remarkably well!  EDU is still white hot and still showing hyper-growth, Insurance is showing steady growth, new technologies such as analytics and lead managements systems appear to be getting traction, etc.  In general, I’m very encouraged – even in the face of a general economy that is still cratering and does not yet appear to have found bottom.

 

LEAD EXCHANGES: THE FUTURE OF LEAD GENERATION?

• James Cham – VP, Bessemer Venture Partners (moderator)
  
• Marc Diana – Founder & CEO, LeadPoint
  
• Anik Ganguly – Board Member, Detroit Trading
  
• Keith Moore – SVP, LendingTree.com & Tree.com

This discussion around “Lead Exchanges” has been going on for years without any clear winning positions – it’s a debate that just seems to bounce back and forth in between the 40-yard lines.  It was a topic at LeadsCon 2008 and receives significant attention on industry blogs such as LeadCritic.

There was a fair degree of contention amongst these four high-octane competitors, with many premises, practices, and models being challenged back and forth.  For example, Anik Ganguly of Detroit Trading felt as though transparency was a requirement for any exchange whereas Payam Zamani was quick to challenge transparency as a requirement so long as customers are comfortable without it.

In my humble opinion, the problem is that there is no standard or widely-accepted definition of an “Exchange.”  On one extreme, one could establish an archetype such as NYSE or eBay and reconcile any practice against theirs – i.e. if NYSE or eBay doesn’t do it and you do, you can’t call yourself an exchange.  On the other extreme one could simply/loosely define an “Exchange” as an “Organized Market” or as an “Interpreter of Supply and Demand.”  The problem there is that virtually EVERY lead seller (as well as every five and dime store for that matter) would then fit under that definition.

An over-arching theme to this entire discussion was that of scale.  It appeared as those most of the panelists felt that owning substantial market share was a requirement for success for any business calling themselves an exchange.  This winner-take-all philosophy probably explained some of the contention. ;-)
My completely unsolicited advice here guys is let’s back away from the word “Exchange.”  I know VC’s love it and it also may affect future exit multiples, but as of now, we don’t know it means and I don’t see any evidence that the buyers and sellers care, per se.  Let’s just describe the value proposition of each individual company to buyers and to sellers and let the rest work itself out without trying shoehorn these vastly different businesses into one category.

Of course, I’m biased, but I was thrilled when I heard my friend Keith Moore mention DoublePositive by name during the panel when he was describing an upcoming partnership announcement with Lending Tree.  Thanks, Keith! :-)

Marc Diana took advantage of the session to announce a new LeadPoint feature called LeadClass, which is a three-tier lead quality ranking that will allow LeadPoint clients to adjust their bid based upon the quality tier of the lead.

 

IN THE SPOTLIGHT – PRIVATE COMPANY SHOWCASE

The purpose of this session was to introduce “some of the most impressive companies you didn’t know about.”  Each company had about 10-minutes to present.

Apologies in advance on this one – since I don’t take notes and since these businesses were intended to be a surprise, there is no listing of them in the conference program that I’m using to write this post.  Thus, I may have some company names wrong here.

ClearLink – This business appeared to me to be an impressive hybrid of Internet marketing (lead generation) and call center sales management all under one roof.  Their focus appeared to be home services and it also appears that they get paid by their client for sales, not leads.  Thus, more of a customer acquisition play.  Other businesses I know that do things similar (often in other verticals as well) are Tranzact, Acceler, and Red Ventures (formerly Red F).

InsuranceLeads.com – This business was presented by their Head of Corporate Sales.  The poor guy had a ton of technical challenges that weren’t his fault.  When he finally got up the video commercial ~ 4-5 minutes, it was awesome.  Very well-produced.  Formerly QuotesAuction, this business sells insurance data leads and also sells insurance Hot Transfers (I believe using a call center out of Ukraine).  They claimed to be the only company doing Insurance Hot Transfers… Ummm… Oops! ;-).  It did look to me as though they did have some pretty slick client-side software though.

Hometown Quotes – Hometown Quotes also sells insurance leads and is a DoublePositive partner (insurance agents who want Hot Transfers of Hometown Quotes leads typically go through us to get that coordinated).  We are big fans of Hunter and his crew! :-)

Pangea Media – Interesting business premise that the best consumer engagement always comes from online surveys (which they refer to as “Quizzes” for consumers).  First company I’ve ever encountered focused exclusively on this area.

Dev Domains – This business finds relatively small/obscure websites with high-value traffic, tracks down the webmaster-owners and offers to buy the site.  They then add value to the site in an
attempt to increase its cash flow and profitability.  In a move I don’t think I’ve ever seen at a tradeshow, the presenter showed a slide of his company’s financials.  If memory serves, it was around $6MM in top line revenue but with $3MM or $4MM in EBITDA.  WOW!  Very impressive money-making model, guys.  Bravo.  Keep up the good work.

Sparkroom – Sparkroom is a business we’ve known for a long time, and we’re huge fans.  CEO Jamie McDonald presented a demo of their analytics software.  They started in the mortgage leads industry but currently gaining traction in the education leads space.

EXHIBIT HALL OPEN

After the general sessions described above, the Exhibit Hall was opened and lunch was served.  In another example of brilliant tradeshow architecture, attendees had to pass through the exhibits in order to get to the catered lunch area.  DoublePositive’s exhibit was right near the front doors – right behind Lending Tree and diagonal from TARGUSinfo.

After lunch, breakout sessions were presented.  Please note that I did not attend many breakout sessions – but I did try to catch all the General Sessions.
Running parallel to the breakout sessions were “Sponsored Workshops.”  Datamark presented a Sponsored Workshop on Predictive Modeling Across Marketing Channels and eBurea’s David Downhan gave a compelling session on “How Lead Scoring Can Work For You – A Hands On Guide.”  My favorite line from David’s session is when he summarized the value of lead scoring by saying “Hey, I just sell three digits.  It’s what you will do with these three digits that count.”  I agree, David! :-)

As I had mentioned above, after our incredible experience at LeadsCon 2008, we wanted to make a big splash at LeadsCon 2009 – hence a Hot Transfers workshop for Lead Buyers and another for Lead Sellers.

The first was presented at 4pm on Wednesday:

LIVE Hot Transfers for Lead Buyers – Evolve Your Lead Delivery Model to LIVE Leads and Supercharge Your Applications

When we looked at the ultimate scheduling, we noticed that our session would be the last session of the day and just before a Happy Hour.  Ugh.  We knew at that point, we probably wouldn’t be able to “teach” anything to anyone – everyone was probably close to “Death by PowerPoint” at that point in the day.  So we decided to take a different philosophical approach – rather than “teach,” let’s just entertain.

So we decided to “dramatize” a typical Internet lead buying process (where all the players are unhappy) and compare it to a LIVE Hot Transfers process (where – shocker – all the players were HAPPY!).  Rich Dent played the role of “The Consumer,” Syed Zaidi played the role of “The Sales Professional,” Brian Ocheltree played the role of “The Lead Seller,” and Casey Cook played the role of “The Lead Buyer.”  Joey Liner played the special role of “Mr. DoublePositive,” appropriate dressed in his super-hero suit.

All the role players provided some colorful insights into their world, their ethos, and their agendas/incentives prior to dramatizing the process.  After dramatizing the typical Internet Lead process, it was clear that all the role players were quite unhappy.  However, from the back of the room, Mr.  DoublePositive Joey Liner raced through the crowd (over the “Theme to Superman” music playing through the PA) to save the day.  A LIVE Hot Transfers process was dramatized and finally, all the role players were quite happy. Judging from the audience reactions, I think that everyone was highly-entertained.

 

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Thursday, March 5, 2009

===================

We repeated the session for Lead Sellers on Thursday at 11am, with only slight variations to calibrate it different from the Lead Buyers session.  Our CTO Syed Zaidi filmed the first session and it is available for your viewing pleasure on our YouTube channel at www.DoublePositive.TV

 

LEAD MANAGEMENT – “GENERATION” IS HALF THE BATTLE

• Mike Ferree – President of LeadTrade (moderator)
  
• Frank Ouimette – Co-founder and CTO of LinkTrust Systems
  
• Raj Parekh – GM of LeadsROI, a MediaWhiz Company
  
• Bill Rice – Founder & CEO of Kaleidico
  
• Jeff Solomon – Founder & SVP of Leads360

The Lead Management session was one of the more popular sessions at LeadsCon 2008.  While relatively cordial, the panelists were highly-spirited during the panel, to say the least.  This year, all the same players were back, but the CEO of LeadMailbox was replaced with Frank Ouimette of LinkTrust systems.

By contrast, this year’s panel felt more subdued.  Perhaps because it took place at 9am instead of the afternoon. ;-)  There was a lot of discussion around the importance of “Speed to Lead” and how the effective systems might facilitate this.  Industry veteran Noel Collins engaged from the audience in some early Q&A dialog with the panelists – probing them for magic numbers within their respective aggregated data sets.  After a good bit of back-and-forth, Jeff Solomon finally closed the thread by saying something to the effect of “Yes, we’ve got it.  But we’re not going to release it publicly – that’s part of our secret sauce that we’ll share with our clients privately.”

 

AD NETWORKS AND DISPLAY

• Rob Leathern – CEO, CPM Advisors (moderator)
  
• Rob Deichert – SVP Publisher Operations & Yield Management, Platform-A (AOL)
  
• Dilip DaSilva – CEO, Exponential (formerly Tribal Fusion)
  
• Dave Zinman – VP of Network Management, Yahoo!
  
• Murthy Nukala – CEO of Adchemy

This was a fabulous panel featuring two of my good friends, Rob Deichert and Murthy Nukala.  Before going into the discussion, let’s start with this premise – display advertising is HARD to make work.  REALLY hard.  Moreover, buying CPM and selling CPA is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hard.  There have only been a few elite firms to crack that code and make this channel work for lead generation at scale.  Effective CPM rates (eCPM) rule the day, and they can vary wildly from vertical to vertical and offer to offer.  And publishers (supply side) are largely ambivalent as to which ad, offer, or vertical fills in the wireframe of their ad inventory.  It’s fiercely Darwinian from the advertising (demand) side.

The discussion began with the topic of Display Ad Exchanges and auction-style ad networks are how they are good things and they here and are here to stay.  Right Media (owned by Yahoo!) is perhaps an example of an exchange where the majority of its inventory is from Owned-and-Operated sites (i.
e. Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Mail, etc.).  Although Advertising.com’s AdLearn manages the Owned-and-Operated inventory of AOL, its real reach largely comes from the third-party network of Advertising.com.

Murthy Nukala summarized any ad network as being four things – Inventory, Data (i.e. Behavioral Targeting data or Demographic Data), Algorithms, and Sales.  He went on to concede that it is extremely difficult for any one network to be superior at more than one or two of those items.

Murthy also mentioned a product that Google (as a result of their acquisition of DoubleClick) will be releasing in the months to come – a game-changing paradigm shift.  What Murthy described sounded to me like a Ping-Post system (common in the leads world) but for display ads.  In other words, Google would send a message out to all potential advertisers that says something like this… “Hey, Mr. Advertiser – I have this (type) user, and he’s about to look at this size ad.  Do you want that ad to be YOUR ad?  If yes, you now have less than 100 milliseconds to let me know how much you are willing to pay for it and also provide me with the creative so that I can display it.”

Whoa!  That’s incredible.  Game changes seldom do all of their disruption over night, but I’ll be watching the effects of this closely.

There were some questions from the audience about things like Display Ad fraud – especially in situations where there are cascading ad networks involved.  I didn’t even know this type of fraud existed.  The answer from Dave Zinman was essentially, “Well, we’re working on ways to mitigate that, if not eliminate it, but at the end of the day, it’s just all baked into the performance metrics relative to the price.”  How about that – the same answer we (the broader industry) often give and/or get at the CPC and CPL levels as well.

 

THE FUTURE OF LEAD GENERATION: GETTING TO 2.0

• Sandy Kory – VP of New Media & Technology, Media Venture Partners (moderator)
  
• Matt Coffin – Investor at Coffin Capital (founder and former-CEO of LowerMyBills.com)
  
• G. Cotter Cunningham – CEO of SmallPonds, Inc.
  
• Saar Gur – Venture Capitalist at Charles River Ventures
  
• Jonathan Turner – Founding Partner, Qatalyst Partners

I found this session to be the most “forward-looking” of all the sessions.  Matt Coffin was his typical brilliant self and he continues to solidify himself as an A-list Tradeshow participant.  One of the things I enjoyed hearing him say was a silver-lining perspective of the current market conditions.  With advertising rates in a free-fall, Matt said something to the effect of he would “be a kid in a candy shop right now” in terms of innovative methods to take advantage of these rates for big profits.  Saar Gur conceded that Lead Generation in general is STILL not a space that is typically a good fit for venture funding since it is so difficult to find any truly sustainable competitive advantage.  And with barriers to entry being so low, there are a lot of people just slugging it out buying media CPM and CPC and turning around and selling CPA.  Tough business, indeed.

 

IF QUALITY IS KING, WHAT IS SCORING? THE ACE IN THE HOLE?

• Alex Baydin – Founder & CEO of PerformLine
  
• David Dowhan – SVP of Online Markets, eBureau
  
• David Sobie – VP of Product, LeadPoint
  
• Dave Wengel – GM of Interactive Markets, TARGUSinfo
  
• Matt Wise – President & CEO, Q Interactive

I found this session to be a bit paradoxical.  One the one hand – WOW! Look at that lineup!  That is a serious cast of industry veteran – sort of like the LeadsCon equivalent of the dream team.  On the other hand, I felt everyone struggled a bit to be able to bring genuinely new dimensions of discussion to the Lead Scoring topic that we haven’t been talking about for the past couple of years.  The issues discussed certainly had a lot of overlap with the Lead Scoring panel of last year.  David Sobie got to plug his new LeadClass – a simple way of product-izing lead scoring from the sell-side.  But in general, I think we’re gonna need to wait this one out for a few more years before critical mass.  The concept of dynamic pricing based on lead scores through all segments of the chain (the Lead Buyer’s BID, the Lead Seller’s ASK, the media costs, etc.) still feel a long way off.  Everybody I know agrees it’s a good idea when they see it on the white board, but I just thinks it’s going to be a relatively slow evolution in order to get all these constituencies to unbundle their economics from blended/batch thinking and into fluid dynamic scoring and pricing.  That said, we remain huge advocates of lead scoring and hope to help in the moving of the mountain efforts.

 

VIP Party at “Pure” (Caesar’s) – Hosted by All Web Leads and LendingTree

In a word, WOW!  I thought the LeadsCon party at LAX in 2008 was impressive, but I think there were more attendees at this party in 2009 then there were TOTAL CONFERENCE ATTENDEES in 2008.  The venue was exquisite – draped in white EVERYTHING (like the name suggests).  The venue was exclusively for LeadsCon and every section had a dedicated server.  And they were good.  The dance floor filled up pretty good by mid-party (after a few drinks made inhibitory synapses fire a bit slower :-)).  Jay even was able to have the party extended by half an hour or so since it was going on strong.  Look in the coming days for lots of pictures on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Special thanks to our friends at LendingTree and our new friends at All Web Leads for Hosting and Sponsoring the high-octane affair.

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SUMMARY

My general takeaway from this event was more than encouraging.  On days that the stock market was tanking even further below the previous support levels, we were attending a vibrant tradeshow that had more than TRIPLED its attendance from the previous year.

The Advertising industry in general is tanking, but this crowd is somewhat insulated because what is remaining of the Advertising industry is speeding up its shift into performance-based delivery models.  Those in the leads world know how to do this better than any other.

Vertically speaking, EDU is clearly carrying the day.  Volume is good, margins are good, pricing paths keep all parties happy and everyone is still in hyper-growth mode.  But that’s what scares me a bit.  I remember feeling the same way about the Mortgage vertical in 2003.  Now, Mortgage was not even the second-most represented vertical at the show.  Wow.  LeadsCon 2009 was the coming out party for the Insurance vertical.  It was fabulous to see all the representation from both the Insurance lead buying and lead selling side, and Insurance
was also frequently a part in the panel topics.

Horizontally speaking, Lead Scoring is still a buzz, but not a tremendous amount of new ideas – rather it is still maturing in the adoption phase.  Display advertising is poised to become much more of a major force in the Lead Gen world that ever before as a result of plummeting CPM’s.  But the most significant horizontal buzz I gleaned from the show was Hot Transfers.  I know, I know – I’m biased.  But I was biased last year too, and I did NOT feel this way after that show.  It was coming up on panel discussions that had nothing to do with Hot Transfers, per se.  Verticals that had never ventured into Hot Transfers territory were discussing ways to make transfers a permanent part of their marketing/sales workflows.  And we had many, many, many people tell us that DoublePositive and Hot Transfers were the big buzz at the show. 

Yes, I’m biased, but there’s no way I’m 100% wrong on feeling this surge of momentum. My spidey-senses are tingling on this one! :-)

Hope to see you all at LeadsCon NYC!

p.s. Please use the comments to give a shout out to Jay Weintraub for another massive success.