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Richard Rosen, FastCall411 founder and CEO, is an expert in the calling applications industry and its relationship to local search. With more than 20 years of direct marketing experience, Rosen served as Vice President, Business Development, at both Jambo and CallSource, each a pioneering firm in the pay-per-call and call measurement spaces, respectively.

At Jambo, Rosen led business development, marketing, sales, public relations and product development. During his tenure, he helped define Jambo's pay-per-call and phone-centric product initiatives, and created and launched JAN, the Jambo Advertising Network, as a vehicle to communicate the company's value proposition to local advertisers and publishers. At CallSource, he spearheaded initiatives to provide call tracking to AutoTrader.com, Cars.com, Verizon Yellow Pages, AOL, Google, Switchboard, ReachLocal, Perform Local, and Citysearch, among others. Rosen writes frequently on pay-per-call and call tracking issues, and is a frequent speaker at industry events.

Rosen founded FastCall411 ( www.fastcall411.com) to improve the experience for consumers in need of local service providers. FastCall411 will deliver better local advertising results to merchants seeking new business while offering a superior partnership model and improved economic yields for partners. Over time, FastCall411 will extend its model to mobile search, directory assistance and other input devices.

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Features

Do Locals Give a Click? Negotiating the Buys to Make Local Advertising Work

Written on
June 30th 2006
Author
by Richard Rosen  |
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Offline — Ask For the Performance-Based Model.
For the millions of businesses that don’t need clicks, there’s one key take-away that seems obvious, but has yet to significantly impact how traditional advertising is bought and sold: a performance-based model. The click is trackable, and has ushered in an era of pay-for-performance advertising that the offline world has been slow to adopt — mostly because advertisers haven’t figured out that they can, and should, demand it.

Here’s a prime example. I was having lunch in a restaurant the other day, when a well-dressed man walked in carrying a notebook and asked for the manager. The manager came out to meet him, and while they stood at the counter the well-dressed man showed the manager a series of glossy postcards. A few stealth glances in their direction gave me a clear picture — this was an advertising sales guy who had come in to cold pitch the restaurant on buying space in his directory or entertainment book. His presentation and materials seemed very professional and impressive. The two men spoke for about two minutes, then the manager sent him away empty-handed.

What struck me was this: the manager obviously wants more business, and this particular advertising opportunity may or may not have been the solution. But the manager didn’t even ask for the chance to try it on a performance basis.

The traditional advertising model doesn’t give him a risk-free chance to test it out, and he didn’t challenge the status quo by asking the question. Spending $5 per lead for up to 100 leads is one thing. Spending that same amount — $500 — on the chance that he may get some new customers is a risk it turned out he wasn’t willing to take. That’s a missed opportunity for everyone involved.

Merchants can learn a few things from the click, and apply these lessons to the medium that serves them best — whether online or offline:

• Track and measure the effectiveness of all advertising spend in the medium that suits you the best (for example, the most useful measurement is often cost-per-call, since phone calls are most local businesses’ preferred point of contact). If you don’t know which medium is best, this measurement process will help you identify where your advertising dollars are most efficiently spent.

• Use your cost-per-call data to negotiate better ad rates from newspapers, directories, the Yellow Pages — all forms of online and offline, print or broadcast.

• Ask for a performance-based test of any advertising medium. These advertising vehicles should be able to back up their claims of delivering leads and customers.

There are myriad places for merchants to spend their advertising budgets, and many of them do reach consumers effectively. Traditional media outlets have shied away from performance-based advertising in the past, but many are coming around and realizing they have a great product, and they should welcome the chance to demonstrate to advertisers the high value of the leads they provide.

The times are changing for both online and offline. But they’ll change faster if advertisers get proactive and start pushing for what they want. It doesn’t hurt to ask, right?



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Reader Comments.

We have found driving to calls to be an important part of getting success from local online advertising. In addition driving to have you target local customers sign up for online email deals has also been effective.

Posted by Ben | 11:49 am on June 30, 2006.

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