• by Tim McHale , May 1, 2002

Getting away to the country to enjoy some R&R was time well-spent last week. Boating about in the Hudson Valley provided some fun, some rest and a whole lot of irony and inspiration for my next voyage into the online space. Being out on the water in early Spring provided some focus and clarity about what it takes to succeed in this business, which helped me to chill out some and reinforced my anticipation for this next phase.

For some reason, I couldn’t help but think about the Hudson River’s namesake, Henry the Dutch Explorer, who in many ways was a great example of the first generation of online marketing machismo. Today we don’t think of Henry Hudson as having crashed and burned, though back then Hudson was the first westerner to over-estimate the power of his own limited will.

Way back on 9/09/09... that’s 1609 as the historians tell us, Henry’s ship entered the mouth of New York Harbor and sailed slowly up the “Hudson.” Old Hank thought he had discovered the Atlantic Ocean’s entrance into China. That’s right, China!

Thoughts of Sugarplum fairies must have danced in Henry Hudson’s head, thinking about the wonders that awaited him. Planning for his arrival, as he sailed up river, he must have mentally prepared for how he would greet the Chinese and how he could begin to trade and make lots of money, much like many of us did when we were awarded thousands of shares of dot-com stock.

At some point, similar to watching the NASDAQ crash, Hudson must have also suspected he “wasn’t in Kansas anymore” and that China was a distant unreachable fantasy. In fact, his first experience may be the genesis to what we now refer to as a “New York Minute.” Henry Hudson never ended up reaching his destination.

And neither have many of us, when we envisioned the Internet as the thing we could simply, smartly navigate to take us to our pot o’gold. We were as let down as Hudson was in seeing how the online hype didn’t lead us to the end of the rainbow.

Yet history shows us that if we learn from early mistakes, we can use them to help us grow. Though he didn’t know it, Hudson’s crushing disappointment inevitably became the platform for others to learn from and build on. For all the disillusionment Silicon Alley has faced in the last 2 years, we’re better off knowing more about the grim realities and difficulties of online monetization than we were in our very arrogant and presumptive ignorance.

Well, more than 200 years after Hudson’s fateful voyage, New York City Mayor DeWitt Clinton’s hopes, dreams and vision also rested upon the River. This time, as opposed to simply sailing through to the promised land, his solution required the application of sacrifice, pain and effort to carve something out of value.

In Clinton’s case it was to challenge Mother Nature, a host of politicians and the Government to transform the Hudson River into the first superhighway of America. How? By extending the Hudson River’s path by over 150 miles, as immigrants carved a deep ditch across New York State, so that trading boats and ships could continue to sail up the Hudson, all the way to the Great Lakes Region.

When it opened in 1825, the Erie (really, the Hudson) Canal was a marvel of engineering and human labor. From Albany to Buffalo, it opened up the American frontier and made westward expansion inevitable. It turned New York Harbor into the nation's number one port and shaped social and economic development for cities and industries to grow and flourish all along the River and Canal.

What’s the moral to these stories? Perhaps that we have to stop looking at Internet solutions as easy to achieve, inexpensive or simple. Like AOLTW found out the hard way, the slick, first-generation sales force of over-promising easier, inexpensive and painless ways for marketers to gain online advantage did not get marketers or the company the results they expected. Ultimately, it got everyone nowhere. As an industry, we have to stop talking about the Net this way once and for all.

We now see that Hudson thought that by just sailing up the River, he would naturally gain the wealth he desired. Mayor Clinton’s method was based on sweat equity, hard work investment and commitment. Perhaps if we approach the Internet similarly, finding constructive ways to access value, like with data collection, CRM and subscription, these are the tools that will help us monetize the Net, though they are neither easy nor inexpensive.

As we move forward into planning for 2003, ask yourself if it’s really in the marketer’s interest to commit less than 5-10% to this medium from an online media/marketing standpoint. Perhaps a more blunt but honest approach might be to tell the marketer to keep their 2% media spend in offline, rather than set online expectations too high, which will cause more cynicism that helps no one in the long run.

In 2002, one must work hard to demonstrate that the Internet magnifies other offline communication initiatives. For as much as it can and should be measured on its own, one of the Internet’s real values is its topspin effect on media plans. Its direct, more personal connection can compliment an otherwise 100% offline plan in ways that more TV, Radio or print frequency can’t. Planned correctly, it’s the special communication ingredient that transforms a good plan into being great.

Now that I’m a little more rested, I realize that the pace of the business is part of why it’s so difficult to gain perspective. It’s a very fast ship we sail. I hope I won’t need to replicate this experience in the future, or see others find themselves unemployed in order to get some insight. However, having now gone through it, it was well worth the pain.