Commentary

Thinking Inside The Box

Picture midtown Manhattan at midday. You're walking along with important things to do, until, abruptly, a hand yanks you off your route and into some shop for a sales pitch.

No sane merchant would think of it, right? Not in the real world, maybe. But in the world of online commerce, it's standard practice. I think it was the inimitable Doug Jaeger of thehappycorp at a "Battle for the heart" event who offered the above analogy. He meant to show how off it was for ads to drag consumers from their present paths to unfamiliar regions of the Web to make their pitches.

That's probably why a small company named Inoventiv and its founder, John Marshall, raised some eyebrows at OMMA East the other week. Marshall came to the conference to launch his Search&Display tool, which fuses search with standard banner technology.

Demonstrating Search&Display's powers, Marshall showed me a mock banner ad for Ford Motor. The ad was seemingly normal, except it invited me to enter my car model of choice and zip code. Submitting the info, I then received an exact price for that particular model from the nearest Ford dealership--still on the ad, mind you.

And even if I--the supposed surfer--didn't end up buying a Ford, the company would still know that there's a consumer with a Manhattan zip code who has interacted with, and demonstrated interest in, a particular model of theirs.

(To be clear, Ford is not yet an Inoventiv client, but Warner Music Group and Thrifty Car Rental are.)

Now, pretty much every rich media insider I contacted regarding Inoventiv insisted this technology is old-hat. "Everyone's been able to do this for years," one said. "We tried it over four years ago, but it didn't get a great response," said another.

Unicast's David Berkowitz, a search authority, had this to say about Search&Display: "People are conducting searches in many more places other than search engines, so it makes sense that you're able to search in ads themselves."

And, while everyone could just as easily envision Inoventiv's success as their failure, only one person with whom I chatted doubted the success of the broader technology itself. He couldn't understand the economics of spending money to build a complex RM creative. Return on investment is based on consumers completing a purchase, he said, while most RMs are used for branding purposes.

I personally don't see why it can't be used just as effectively for either purpose.

Yanking people off their paths is a surefire loser. And I can't recall ever accepting one of those coupons they give out on sidewalks. But, if I were considering a new car, a Ford rep placed in the right spot at the right time, offering just the right information, could be very effective indeed.

Too costly to have a sales rep intercepting me in my path?

In the real world, maybe.

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