• by Adam Herman , June 13, 2002

The interactive marketing division of Agency.com succeeds by working with clients grounded in solid marketing principles.
Whether selecting clients to work with, hiring staff, determining compensation, or developing media plans, i-traffic is an agency that likes to do things its own way.

Founded in 1995, i-traffic became the interactive marketing division of Agency.com in October 1999. Since then, i-traffic has grown to 180 interactive marketing professionals with headquarters in New York and offices in San Francisco, Chicago, and London.

“Most of our clients are established brick-and-mortar, traditional advertisers,” says i-traffic President Ron Kovas, who in early 1999 decided his agency would primarily pursue Fortune 1000 clients. “Too many decisions for start-up, online businesses were being made by venture capitalists in monthly board meetings, who often come up with the market strategy flavor of the month. We found we can achieve success, especially online success, with clients who are grounded in sound marketing principles.”

This philosophy has applied to the people they hire as well. “We built our staff not with web people, but with traditional marketers who knew how to manage client relationships. It’s easier to teach someone three-year-old online marketing practices than to ingrain someone with a base of 15 years of traditional marketing/advertising expertise,” says Kovas, himself a 20-year veteran of J. Walter Thompson. He says this is why the average age of people working at i-traffic is over 30 years old, which is “not common for an interactive shop.”

With security and trust in his staff, Kovas is willing to risk the agency’s lifeblood: compensation. i-traffic bases its fees on performance incentives whenever this works best for clients. Compensation is based on reaching established goals, such as getting new customer sign-ups to buy a product/service. He said this has proved to be profitable for both parties.

To ensure their clients—British Airways, Discovery Networks, Heineken UK, Reuters, Sprint, Staples, Nokia, and Texaco, among others—get the needed results, i-traffic develops innovative, return-on-investment strategies to acquire and retain customers. Online advertising, alliance deals, affiliate networks, micro-sites, email marketing, and online loyalty schemes fulfill these strategies.

Another service they perform is site analytics. This service began when some clients complained that i-traffic drove people to their site but no conversions were taking place; hence, they believed they were getting nonqualified click-throughs. After in-depth examination of the user experience on these sites, i-traffic found the problem wasn’t with the people coming over but that the sites were losing sales because of poor site design.

This led to the creation of their Department of Performance Analytics, where i-traffic can detail where users drop out of the buying process because of site usability problems. i-traffic does small fixes on its own; major redesigns they pass on to parent company Agency.com to handle.

Another department that has a high level of prominence at i-traffic is Media, which is led by Eric Valk-Peterson, VP, Media Director, who was one of the first employees at i-traffic. Valk-Peterson is responsible for overseeing all New York media operations and helping to manage media services across all i-traffic offices. Prior to joining i-traffic he worked at DeWitt Media, where he performed traditional as well as interactive media planning, including work on the first interactive campaigns for The Discovery Channel and BMW North America.

“The Internet is not losing appeal or interest to consumers,” says Valk-Peterson, regarding where the Internet is headed. “I see this as an exciting time for advertisers. There is much more of a collaborative effort between publishers and advertisers in terms of financial and creative flexibility. Publishers are realizing that they really have two clients—advertisers and consumers.”

A good example of the increased cooperation between i-traffic and the media community is the work they did for Discovery Channel. i-traffic was assigned the task of promoting Discovery Channel’s Land of the Mammoth cable program, which aired in March 2001. This was a follow-up to their hugely successful Raising the Mammoth.

Along with other online advertising efforts, they decided to do an innovative wireless buy with Vindigo, because the psychographics of Discovery Channel’s viewers—a high percentage of forward thinkers/early adapters—mirror that of Vindigo. Vindigo is a wireless platform that enables companies to capitalize on an array of business opportunities made possible by mobile devices, such as publishing location-based content to travelers and urban residents and driving foot traffic to stores using location-based advertisements and promotions.

Initiated by Jay Altschuler, a media manager at i-traffic, they came up with a “first of its kind” media buying approach to raise awareness and build buzz to drive tune-in traffic. “To break through the clutter, you have to go beyond the norm,” says Altschuler. On the bottom of local city listings on Vindigo, Discovery Channel ran a three-week campaign of two-line text ads promoting the Mammoth special.

When searching via Vindigo on a PDA, the user was greeted by a targeted teaser ad prompting them to tap on the ad directing them to a landing page. At that point, the user learned details about Land of the Mammoth. Also included were options to receive an email reminder, and to automatically populate the user’s date book with the show time and set an alarm to go off just prior to airtime.

“Syncing a promotion with a personal device such as a Palm Pilot date book is a great marriage,” says Altschuler, who declined to specify the cost of the buy or to detail the results. “The fact that it reminds viewers to tune in just prior to the beginning of the program is what people who adhere to the Recency Theory strive for.”

MediaPost VP of Operations Adam Herman can be reached at adam@mediapost.com.