ADOTAS Conversations: Bob Carrigan, President, IDG Communications
Now that we’ve focused on the content/publishing side, let’s talk about IDG’s advertising/sales strategies online. Was it a big step in transitioning and restructuring your sales initiative to cater to this space?
Yes, because the sheer number of advertisers is larger in the potential. The universe of advertisers on the Web is larger than in print and so we’ve had to reorient our teams to expand their focus. That requires selling in different ways.
What’s the learning curve like with that?
Well, there’s a lot of training. Fortunately, we’ve got a highly trained staff. I mean, the [online] business is so big for us. It’s not like some small ancillary business. So our reps get it. That’s where a lot of the growth is. It varies by the individual, but I would say the majority are getting it pretty well, but there are obviously some who don’t get it as well and you do your best to train them and try to move them along.
From a marketing standpoint, a lot of people succeeding in interactive started in traditional and offline.
A lot of people, except for the folks that are just beyond this generation, a lot of our folks have come from traditional media and it gives them a traditional advantage if they understand marketing. There’s a lot to learn about this new medium. If it’s new to them, it’s a lesson to learn. Again, we tend to hire people who understand the technology a bit more and we’ve got a good staff of some very proactive reps that are out there—the real “go-getters.”
Approximately how big is your sales staff for the interactive space?
Well, the way we’re organized at IDG is that each of our publishing business units—in the US, I think we have seven—all have salespeople that are dedicated to selling the products in that business unit. So, it’s advanced print and online. It’s a little bit hard to isolate. We do have some pure online folks, but a lot of them sell all of our products. They sell by brand. The way our structure works is that any one of our business units has dedicated online people, but then they also have a field sales team that sells all of our products.
So everyone communicates with one another in a sense.
Yeah, we use CRM software to be able to manage the account in each sales process and there’s a lot of interaction between sales teams. And then we do have a group that sells to our corporate accounts, [which are] our largest accounts. They do sell on a centralized basis to some of our largest accounts, and they’ll do larger contracts with some of the big accounts. Those contracts include online, print, events, and whatever other businesses we’re in.
Is there any certain “bread and butter” sales strategy at IDG, and any certain method that doesn’t really fit your business model?
I’m trying to figure out how to answer that question. I guess the point is, a lot of the marketers that we do business with, you have to understand, they’ve aggressively embraced online. This is not some crazy thing anymore. This is part of our every day. Any one of our reps has the ability to sell any one of our products. We do have some sets of dedicated online people, but our strategy is just to make sure that we achieve client expectations and it’s not just about selling.
It’s about service. Service is a very big part, and that’s why we have a lot of dedicated online people because online requires…one of the things that we’ve really tried to emphasize is that online requires optimization and a lot of account management, more so than print or events. So I’d say that account teams in sales really help maximize the returns. And then it obviously increases our potential to renew the account and increases our long-term revenue. So it helps the client and it helps us.
Do you guys do across-the-network initiatives?
Oh yes. There’s a fair amount of that that we do. For instance, we were the first in our category to introduce a contextual ad program that runs through the majority of our sites. It’s called TechWords. If you’re online and you go to www.techwords.com, we think it’s a great URL because it’s all about keywords and technology. You can open up an account right there and buy contextual ads through our network of sites. That’s a great example of how we have leveraged IDG in our network of sites to be able to create a highly contextual ad program for marketers—one-stop shopping.
The second is called IDGconnect.com. That is a lead program. What we did was we basically amassed a database of over 6 million customer records that we have aggregated from all around our business units. They’re everything from people that have gone to our events, that have signed up for newsletters online, and signed up for print publications. We’ve created one master database, and then we’re able to do really smart targetinglead programs against this audience. It’s not about the brand, it’s about the audience. So if you’re looking to reach buyers of particular products, we can go through the entire database in one easy place and be able to market to those folks.
Now, we wouldn’t have these audiences if we didn’t have these great brands attracting these audiences. So you can see that what we do, our strategy, is we leverage our brands and the unique attributes of those brands to attract audiences that we then sell both on a brand basis, but also on a pan-IDG basis, depending on how the marketer wants to buy. Like some marketers just want to buy CIO, and some want to buy across the entire network and reach people that are, say, buying PCs or storage products. So we can target these folks in multiple ways.
Through IDGConnect?
Through Connect and also through Tech Words. Tech Words is kind of like an AdWords or AdSense. It’s that for the tech category. We’re the only ones who do this today, where you can just go in—it’s an auction-based program too, by the way—and marketers bid on keywords just like on any of those other products on Google, etc. They bid on those keywords and it’s an auction within our own company, within our network of sites, and they buy keywords.
Can you give me an example?
Let’s say you’re interested in purchasing Enterprise Storage Solutions. You would bid on that keyword, and then there’s an auction that we then smart-serve the ad through where those keywords appear through our network. So that’s one way that we make it very easy for marketers to be able to buy targeted inventory across our site. It’s a listing, so it’s contextual. It’s text listings like the sponsored links that you see from Google, etc. But that’s a sponsored link program, whereas IDG Connect is a database program.
Let’s say you have a whitepaper or you have a webcast or a podcast, and you just want to reach storage buyers. We can send emails to people in our database to get them to sign up to participate in the webcast or to download a whitepaper. So, these two programs are examples of how we’re leveraging the brands and the network.
It’s an advantage that you’ve developed in-house product lines.
We have others too in development as you would imagine. But anybody can come to us today and buy the network of sites through a variety of ways, or they can buy individual sites. Circling back to that question you asked me before, it’s about service and it’s about being flexible, because what we have found is that some marketers like to buy on a pan-IDG basis, some like to buy by site.
Our philosophy is to be flexible and based on the sheer size of we have to offer and plus some of these new programs that we’ve created, we’re able to offer some pretty flexible solutions for them, to be able to meet their needs, whether it’s amassing leads or whatever it is. That’s our approach.
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Tags: auction-based_advertising, contextual_targeting, IDG, pc_world and SEMArticle Sponsor
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