Oettinger arrived at ad network and ad serving outfit Fastclick two years ago with a few years of experience under his belt from positions at competitor ValueClick Inc., as well as ValueClick's affiliate network, Commission Junction. When he started with Fastclick in a publisher support role, the company encompassed just ten people; today, the firm boasts a staff of nearly 80, according to Oettinger. Oettinger's days are spent ensuring ad campaign performance for Fastclick's top 200 publishers, as well as building the company's publisher base, and making sure to stay a step ahead of the competition. One way he works towards that is by taking customer requests into consideration when developing Fastclick's system interface changes. Another way: not underselling publisher clients. To keep advertisers from coming to Fastclick directly and possibly undercutting publisher clients' rate cards, the company does not publicize the names of sites in its network. What are your favorite online destinations in the a.m.? Why? I always go to our top [publisher sites], especially the ones I've been working with on a regular basis. I check out their sites to see if what we talked about is set in place. Then I go to message boards for publishers like GeekVillage.com as well as SitePoint. That goes back to our tier two or three [publisher sites]. I can monitor their discussions and hop in there if need be. It's also a great place to see what competitors are up to. And then there's the IAR [Internet Advertising Report] and MediaPost for work related news. In the morning I also check out Santa Barbara News-Press and then Weather.com. What other sites do you visit frequently? Why? Launch.com - just if I want to look up a record or music video or radio stream. The '80s covers station is great....No dentist office music! I also go to MensHealth for fitness, nutrition, and lifestyle information, and Discovery.com for the TV station. I'm a fan of Monster Garage and American Chopper...I have a newer model Mustang I'm always toying with. What is the most challenging part of your job? This kind of goes back to the top publishers I'm working with. They all have different needs and different styles of how they conduct business....I don't ever want to give a generic answer to all of them. If they're noticing, say, slow banner performance, I'll look at their account and see what they're talking about. [Through the company's system, Matt can view sites from the publisher's perspective]. It just takes extra time. The challenge is adapting to each publisher's individual needs, but still offering the same level of service to all. The other challenge is that we always have so many ideas...it's always prioritizing that. What do you like best about your job; what keeps you interested? I love being able to work with such a wide variety of clients. The knowledge that I get from the large publishers, I can filter to the smaller publishers. Just helping a publisher develop a better site that a user is going to come back to. In addition, to maximize their ad inventory and their revenue. When will true media integration take place for advertisers? We're already seeing that, not that we can act as a one-stop-shop, but that we can work with advertisers to tie in their offline with their online efforts. Call centers are great, using a call center rather than saying, "Go to our site." We can display the phone number right there in the ad and that can be geographically targeted. They can track those calls right back to that ad. We see [the use of call centers] most with travel advertisers. What's the most divisive online policy issue right now? Contextual marketing is hot right now: text links, matching image ads to content, etc. It can be too over-targeted. Say I'm on a medical site with an article on alcoholism and it populates with "Party with Corona" [text links or ads]. [When planning] future development and future products, that issue always comes up. Blogs and communities. They're getting pretty hot right now -- like Friendster and all those blog sites. The problem is there is the lack of real-time control over the content. If someone has a blog, and they [write about how they] hate America, Visa, or a car insurance company doesn't want to be associated with a message below something saying that. There's no real-time control. MediaPost's In the Trenches profile series aims to honor the real troopers of the interactive ad industry, the up-and-coming creative staffers, the ad sales underlings, the minds behind the technologies that make it all happen. Do you know someone who deserves a salute from MediaPost's In the Trenches? Let us know! Contact Kate Kaye at kate@mediapost.com.
Peter Blackshaw, Intelliseek chief marketing officer, had an unusual firsthand experience with the impact of online word-of-mouth. It started with his purchase of a hybrid car. Blackshaw was initially very satisfied with his purchase--so satisfied, in fact, that he took the initiative to do what many early adopter/influential types across the globe now do on a day-to-day basis: write about his experience on a Web log. Blackshaw founded HybridBuzz.com, which became a mouthpiece for Blackshaw and other early adopters with fuel-efficiency on the brain to talk about their like-minded enthusiasm for hybrids. However, one day, Blackshaw discovered his hybrid vehicle was falling far short of the mileage that his car dealer guaranteed him. Naturally, Blackshaw expressed his displeasure on his Web log, and others responded with similar gripes. Soon thereafter, Blackshaw received calls from Wired magazine and Slashdot journalists requesting more information about what was surely a scam. By the end of the day, Blackshaw said there were 2,000 messages on his blog posted in response to his finding, and within a few days he was fielding calls from CBS Evening News, which was poised to do a 3-minute segment on hybrid cars. This represents, albeit in a magnified sense, the power of consumer-generated media (CGM). CGM refers to commonly archived online content that is readily accessible by other consumers or key marketplace influencers. Blackshaw uses the term CGM--and not word-of-mouth--because there is one crucial difference between the two terms: CGM is highly measurable, although very few market research firms do so. Now, Blackshaw makes his living analyzing the effect of such online word-of-mouth on brands. At an ARF Webcast entitled "Consumer-Generated Media: The New Metric for Quantifying Word-of-Mouth," Blackshaw presented evidence of CGM's impact, discussing both the threats and opportunities it poses to brands. As opposed to other media, Blackshaw said, "the Web, really, is first about listening," and consumer dissatisfaction, in the digital age, can be detrimental to a brand if it strikes a nerve in the wrong kind of person. These wrong kind of people are called speakers--and they represent roughly 10 percent of the population, but trickle through to influence 90 percent of the population, called seekers. According to research conducted by Forrester and Intelliseek, the trust factor for consumer-to-consumer communication is near 90 percent. As Blackshaw says, so-called speakers "are finding reach in ways that have never been experienced before," through various online mouthpieces such as blogs, bulletin boards, public/private discussion boards, forums, reviews and opinions on product pages, and consumer feedback on branded Web sites. Blackshaw pointed out that marketers continue to spend more and more on paid search, even though it might only click-through 3 percent of the time, while more often, Web users are clicking on natural results that have a greater likelihood of directing them to a CGM. These are the root causes of most online word-of-mouth phenomena. However, each leaves a digital trail behind it for an enterprising public relations or marketing person to follow, according to Blackshaw. "CGM can be a very powerful means of auditing your entire marketing mix, because it's entirely measurable," he said, noting that CGM requires vigilance on the part of PR agencies and marketers. It also enables them to figure out who their clients' influentials are--something planners could take advantage of by segmenting this audience, sending it product samples for testing, or generating marketing ideas based on the buzz they create, etc. As compared with traditional marketing, CGM is high-reach and high-impact, according to Intelliseek data. It exceeds traditional marketing in its high trust rate and little-to-no cost, but it is erroneously perceived as having low perceived frequency, which Blackshaw noted is no longer true in the digital age.