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ClickZ Interview with Glenn Fleishman************************************************************ The ClickZ Letter September 18, 1997 Issue Three Ann Handley, Editor ann@clickz.com ************************************************************ Welcome to the ClickZ Letter! In this week's issue: The ClickZ Q?: Glenn Fleishman ************************************************************ ARIA RECORDER REPORTER from ANDROMEDIA Is the third-generation web activity reporting system that EMBRACES THE EVOLUTION OF THE WEB AND MAKES YOUR ADVERTISING MORE PRODUCTIVE. To find out how ARIA can improve your on-line advertising efforts visit: http://www.andromedia.com ************************************************************ The ClickZ Q? This Week's Guest: Glenn Fleishman http://www.glennf.com Having worked in various capacities all across the Net, Glenn Fleishman is truly an industry pioneer. Companies? He's run them. Books? He's written them. Facts? He knows them. Opinions? Well, he's got them, too. Glenn's a Yalie who was in publishing before he co-founded Point of Presence Company (POPCO) in mid-1994, just as the World Wide Web started to accelerate. Around that time, he also began moderating the Internet Marketing Discussion List, a forum for discussion of marketing to and on the Internet. The widely read list had over 7,000 subscribers on its last day (in 1996), and precipitated Tenagra Corporation's Online Advertising Discussion List and MMGCO's Internet-Sales Moderated Discussion List. He sold POPCO in 1996 to join Amazon.com, where he dealt with managing, increasing, and improving a catalog that grew from one million to 2.5 million items during his tenure. In early May 1997, he turned to freelance writing and consulting -- a role he has relished off and on since the start of his career. In between, Fleishman has always played the role of unsolicited pundit. And, he points out, offering his opinion without asking first has gotten him some nice gigs, from freelance articles to books. Currently, Fleishman is revising Real World Scanning and Halftones for its second edition. (For the first edition, he acted as managing editor, designer, and wrote the Photo CD chapter; David Blatner and Stephen F. Roth wrote the book.) Fleishman is also chairing the Web Advertising '98/New York Conference. CLICKZ: You are known as one of the founding fathers of internet marketing, dating back to your being moderator of the Internet Marketing Discussion List. Given the many changes in internet marketing and advertising you have witnessed over the past several years, what developments are the ones you see as the most promising? FLEISHMAN: I have to say that I feel like things are pretty much the same as they were two years ago, except that some techniques have changed. The newer, more animated and interactive ads are interesting, but they don't really change the picture that much. Interstitial advertising is the biggest development, and it has the most potential to turn parts of the Internet into programming. But it can only be used in limited situations. Jupiter's report on advertising projects a significant minority of ads in a few years will be interstitial, but I think that's rampant speculation as the advertisers will drive the market with their money. If advertising sites develop new, better ideas about how to deliver customers or change minds or impress brands on surfers, advertising will put their money into it. Of course, there are limited modalities on the Internet as it exists today, partly due to bandwidth, partly to software, and, frankly, partly to creativity. Glenn Davis [Project Cool, www.projectcool.com] says that he was the first person to do pop-up windows for advertising some months ago where a separate window appears with advertising material in it. Now that's great, and I don't doubt he was first or among the first. But it's really not that different from other techniques. You Don't Know Jack (Berkeley Systems), and some similar downloadable games or environments like mPath Interactive's that work over the Internet, are really the first new kind of thing where you are put into an entirely different mode of interaction. I heard a guy from Mattel several years ago call a certain kind of interaction "Coke machine interactivity": you push the button and the can comes out. And that's really the mode in which most of Web advertising is locked today. It's a model that works, but everyone isn't entirely satisfied with it -- sort of cola aftertaste, as it were. CLICKZ: What developments do you find troubling? FLEISHMAN: Two big ones: interstitials and tracking. I like interstitials conceptually, but hijacking a browser might result in massive user backlash and avoidance of sites. You can get "suckered" once, but the second time you might just go away. I remember seeing the first interstitials on Word a long time ago, and feeling a small sense of annoyance. But I was also impressed. As more regular users come on board who care less and less about technology and view the Web entirely as a medium, interstitials will certainly seem familiar and not as jarring -- they'll have no basis of comparison. But deployment has to be careful. I remember Steve Manes, a columnist at the New York Times, telling me quite some time ago that he thought Java's principle function would be to seize control of users' machines for 15 or 30 seconds to present an ad they couldn't escape from. And it would be used on every site, so you'd have to opt out of the Web entirely to not be involved in that mode of advertising. That's a terrible thought, because we will really lose eyeballs that way and permanently -- potentially-- and we have to make sure that it doesn't come to pass. Advertisers can benefit from interstitials used appropriately, and there has to be care to avoid AOL-type missteps that reverberate across the industry or industries involved in this. Really, it comes down to creativity again. Tracking is a "troubling development" because the technology has been so poorly explained to end-users. And people who write about it are often scarcely informed. I often see articles that say that cookies pass user information like credit card numbers. And this is a bad explanation. Cookies can be anything from being like having your hand stamped at a conference to being like your driver's license. The fact is that it's impossible for a cookie to contain any information about yourself -- or be a key that points to this information -- unless you've provided it. Yes, you can use cookies to track user patterns and even how a single user goes through a site. Conceivably, companies with sufficient traffic could combine cookies with buying behavior with clickthrough behavior with web site trolling...and data mine the results to target ads, offers, or threats at these users. The fact is, this happens every day in the real world in a more intrusive manner. I hate getting unsolicited phone calls and they don't do anything for me. No one has ever called and said, "Hi, your phone bill this month has been paid by XYZ Corp., bringing you the finest ball point pens money can buy and would you like a thousand of them for $19.95, Mr. Fleishman?" If it worked that way, I might be okay about it. On the web, the limited amount of tracking, analysis, and customized ad delivery is part of the money getting diverted to sites that are providing content that I read and want. I don't go to pages with ads because I'm randomly trolling; I go to news.com or the New York Times on the Web for information. I'm willing to give up some of my mindshare as part of that transaction. You'd think with all of the marketers involved on the Web, that some group or groups would figure out a way to effectively market this concept to the users so they understand the tradeoffs. Personally, and honestly, I would ban users from sites if they won't accept cookies or try to exclude ads. This is anti-social behavior in the sense that these users are depriving these sites of income that enables them to provide these resources, which are not public utilities, but paid for. My metaphor would be the whole social contract: if I make a living in the United States and get paid in dollars, I've opted into the system, and I don't feel I can arbitrarily stop paying tax and so forth as I am realizing the benefits of the system. The police come to my house when I call. The traffic lights work for me. Insurance companies pay for my prescription drugs. If I want to opt out of that, I can't go a la carte. And I know this attitude is unpopular. If I were running a commercial sites that took ads at the moment, I doubt I would implement my ideas, but I have a feeling many sites will start doing this in the next year. CLICKZ: In your farewell to the 7,000-member Internet Marketing Discussion List way back in June of '96, you pointed to yourself as a main cause of the decline of its content...specifically because you had run out of the time and energy the list required. If this was the case, why didn't you hand the management of the I-M list to someone else? Why not let it live on? FLEISHMAN: I'll go back to June 1994, when I started my first Net list: WWWORDER, a list for discussing how to implement Web ordering systems. This started just a month before I did Internet Marketing. I had great hope that WWWORDER would be a forum where we could learn and exchange and figure out how to turn the Internet into a great medium to placing orders. I realized within about two weeks, however, with several hundred people on the list, that no one participating had a clue about how to do it. Those that did were also on the list, but they wouldn't ante up -- they had put their hard work and money into building systems and weren't about to reveal the secrets. The same became true of Internet Marketing by early 1996, although it took me a while to accept that. Most people who had figured out secrets, tricks, etc., or who had valuable information and analysis about what worked either wouldn't or couldn't share it with the group. There was too much value in this information, and either you would sell it (by writing a report for Jupiter, or Forrester, or one of the others) or use it yourself. But you certainly wouldn't reveal it to your competitors -- or colleagues. Because of that, the utility of the whole thing disappeared. The discussions wound up on the same topics, none of which was really useful to real marketers: spamming, selling advertising, and setting up a site. There were definitely side issues and discussions on issues of the day. But there wasn't much new or useful. I didn't hand the list off, because it's success and interest to others was in part due to my iron-fisted moderation. I didn't want to be responsible directly or indirectly for the list becoming bad. Killing it preserved it in amber and sparked other lists to get off the ground. I look at the major lists covering these topics today -- Internet Sales run by John Audette, MMGCO, and Online Advertising run by Richard Hoy, Tenagra Corp. -- and think I did the right thing. (John's list started in Nov. '95, so predated the demise of IMDL.) I did get a lot of criticism for not passing the names on to someone else. I couldn't just host the list and not moderate because of the huge amount of technical support it required (another reason I killed it off). But I felt that I couldn't guarantee what my subscribers would get from another group. So I thought it best to give them the choice of signing up with new lists or not. I am, by the way, starting a new list, which is really an electronic newsletter: NetBITS (www.netbits.net). It'll be issued weekly and feature articles of interest to those who use the Internet quite a bit, whether for work or fun, and want to know more of what's happening and what's in the pipeline. CLICKZ: Over the past year, you were the catalog manager for Amazon.com, arguably the leading online retailer on the net. Could you tell us a little about what you were doing there? FLEISHMAN: My goals at Amazon.com were informational in nature. My role there was to help organize and clarify the kinds of information Amazon.com had about books and build a framework on which to hang new information and sort the details we already had. In my tenure, I helped increase the catalog from one million to 2.5 million items, dramatically expanded the amount of content (reviews, synopses, tables of contents) available for each book and overall, and developed a cross-referencing system that allowed content from one specific edition of a book (a single ISBN'd title) to be linked to all editions of the book. This doesn't have much to do with marketing or advertising, but I'm an information guy. I actually did quite a bit of perl hacking while I was there, too, as well as being a general busybody. I interacted quite a bit with marketing, and was involved in the interviewing and hiring of the current VP of Marketing. CLICKZ: What lessons did you learn while you were there? Any things you will be determined NOT to do, having seen it tried and failed there? FLEISHMAN: The CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, has kept a laser beam focus on the core business and principles that he's had from day one. That's an incredible lesson. Jeff is tremendous at cutting through any situation to the heart of the matter and analyzing it on whether it's something Amazon.com should be doing or whether it's extraneous. Many notions and ideas were tossed by the wayside because they didn't fall sufficiently within the mission; others were adopted wholeheartedly, like selling out of print books. Jeff also taught me, as did the VP of Customer Service (note that it's a VP level position), the Chief Operating Officer, and several others in the company, that customer service is critical to a business that has customers. Duh, yeah, I know... pretty obvious. But the commitment behind that went from absolute newest, lowest-level employee all the way up to Jeff. Every piece of e-mail into Amazon.com gets answered intelligently within about a day; when I left 50 people were worked 60-hour weeks just to accomplish that and that was in May 1997! Barnes and Noble, by contrast, punted for me -- my first query to them about why I couldn't find Scott Adams's newest book took a week to get answered, was answered by two people, and neither answer was useful or correct or took into account my actual question. Jeff, by the way, has always insisted on hiring the best possible people in customer service (as well as at the rest of the company). I predicted, and I think rightly so, that Barnes and Noble is not doing this, and it shows. B? has missed their own lesson! You walk into a B? brick-and-mortar and it's one of the most pleasant experiences you get in the retail world. On the down side, I learned that using proprietary software rather than off-the-shelf components can limit your flexibility. Amazon.com had to "roll their own" because web systems didn't exist that were integrated with databases at the time they got started. However, even while I was there, there wasn't enough of a shift for me to systems that were more standard and flexible, and would have allowed faster deployment of new features -- like search by publisher! The programming team there is incredible, though, and the site still feels amazing, even though I know every thing I'd still like to see in place. CLICKZ: As conference chair of Web Advertising '98, what are your hopes for the gathering? What do you expect to draw crowds this year? FLEISHMAN: What we've done for '98/New York is laser beam in on issues that affect buyers and marketers. We read every evaluation from previous events and use statistical analysis to understand exactly where we succeeded and failed with sessions, speakers, and overall focus. This time around, I would say the focus is around deliverables and deals: how do you get the best results (with hard numbers to back up those sessions) and where do you find the deals. For instance, we've got the return of one of our most popular sessions, What's a Click Worth, where the speakers analyze four major objectives from their perspectives: direct sales, cost per download, banner exchange, and raw impressions. We have David Yoder back to talk even more precisely about reaching unduplicated customers and figuring exactly what the costs of web advertising are compared to conventional media. Michael Tchong will be talking about numbers in a session devoted to analyzing all the data out there and explaining where to find the best statistics and which numbers you need to know. We've chosen speakers primarily who don't have a product to sell, which we know is rare in the industry. Our goal is get people on stage who will deliver a thesis -- like, using red as a background color in a banner increases clickthroughs and sales -- and then talk about how they achieved proving this, showing examples, the process of development, and hard numbers. There will be conceptual overviews of new areas and some background information about how parts of the technology work, but we really want to show the folks who are doing the ad buys or building campaigns what works, how to do it, and how to measure success. Let me put it this way: there will be no "future of web advertising" sessions at Web Advertising '98/New York. They're all about how to deal with the here and now. ************************************************************ Real-world answers from the people who make web advertising _work._ Web Advertising '98: How to Bring the World to Your Web Site Mark Your Calendar: February 2-4, New York City http://www.thunderlizard.com/webad.html?CLZemlWATX ************************************************************ This Past Week on ClickZ! September 19, 1997 Scott Cherkin Thinking it Through: Calculating the Risks of Performance Based Pricing http://www.clickz.com/archives/091997.html September 18, 1997 Ray Taylor Transatlantic Trade: Why be afraid? http://www.clickz.com/archives/0918197.html September 17, 1997 Rob Frankel Future Push: Yelling Toasters and Nagging Refrigerators? http://www.clickz.com/archives/091797.html September 16, 1997 Michael Sexton Service Businesses On the Net: Getting Traffic and Closing the Sale http://www.clickz.com/archives/091697.html September 15, 1997 Michael Bannen Internet Advertisingâs Weakest Link: Hiding from Would-Be Customers http://www.clickz.com/archives/091597.html September 13, 1997 Sharon Tucci Reciprocal Links: What Are They Worth To You? http://www.clickz.com/archives/091397.html ************************************************************ Next Week on ClickZ: MONDAY: Tina Koenig of Express Press talks about the value of site awards TUESDAY: Ken Glaser of The Internet Culinary CyberCity shares his site's approach to web advertising WEDNESDAY: Rob Frankel's weekly rant THURSDAY: James Houck of Fallon-McElligott offers web wisdom FRIDAY: ClickZ Publisher Andy Bourland is on a tear.... ************************************************************ If you have received this in error,or do not wish to receive the ClickZ Letter, visit http://cgi.server.com:10154/WebApps/mail-list -unsubscribe.cgi?unique=7416077 to unsubscribe from this mailing list. ************************************************************ Copyright, ClickZ Corporation, 1997 |