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ADOTAS Conversations: Steve Parker & Jeff Adelson-Yan, Levelwing Media

Written on
February 8th 2007
Author
by Kiran Aditham  |
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What is an agency’s role this year as compared to last year? What are the trends/challenges facing an agency like yours?

Jeff: One of the things that is definitely coming into the forefront is video . We are helping clients to find a way to best optimize using video and monetizing video for those that have a lot of video content. I think the Internet offers a tremendous opportunity, and right now, it can be more than a repurposed 30-second TV spot, pre-roll or a post-roll video. The way people interactive and use video online is very different than video on TV.

I think those are the challenges and things. We have to uncover as an agency, how we best use video?

Steve: As an agency, we deal with publishers daily. There are publishers that strictly work on CPMs and others that strictly work on lead generation platforms and a cost-per-lead basis. There are very few that understand and grasp the model of utilizing both to their best advantage. I think that there is going to be a shift in terms of how you integrate those two to work in conjunction with one another and for appropriate metrics.

Obviously if you are a brand client, you want to base your metrics and success based on brand objectives. When you have a direct response advertiser, it’s obviously going to be very much based on numbers. But right now, there’s a very big separation between church and state of those two things. I think you’re going to start to see them come a little bit closer, and [become] ingrained into these publisher sales organizations where they’re taking advantage of those opportunities. It’s going to allow them as an organization to grow and take on clients that they have not been allowing themselves to take on in past years.

Everybody is talking video it seems.

Steve: The thing that’s funny is that video is essentially not that new. Obviously, you had the last year-and-a-half or so one or two companies that have come in that have really just solely focused on video. In 1997, I worked for a company called Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation. We put a ton of live video medical procedures online. A live birth was one of them, which I think is still ranked in the top 4 or 5 of all one-time streaming video events on the Internet in terms of total viewership.

So, it is not like video is something brand new, but it’s just figuring out what is the best way to take advantage of it now that it’s more prominent. Obviously, you also have greater distribution of hi-speed access versus where we were in ‘96-’97.

Tell me about some of your existing clients/case studies.

Steve: Bridgestone/Firestone is the world’s largest manufacturer of tires and rubber products. They are a very big client, and we work with three different divisions of the company, [each] having their own separate objectives and goals. The particular case study we have on our web site, levelwing.com, is very brand-specific and in short, we document how we saved them lots of money, and provided some really good return and feedback for them in some targeted areas.

In addition to Bridgestone, College Loan Corporation is one of the great clients we are privileged to work with. They’re privately held, so I couldn’t release to you specific numbers. But they’re a very successful business, and one of the fastest-growing companies in their space. They have outstanding customer service, which makes them stand above and beyond any of their competitors. We have really helped their business grow. They’re very direct response-driven in terms of their model and their objectives, and everything we do for them is designed to meet their back-end metrics.

One of the things that makes us different as a business is we actually allow the client to pay us based on the same metric that we pay the publishers. It creates a very good ecosystem. We hold the publishers to the same standards we hold ourselves to. Everyone feeds off the same thing, and it makes sense for long-term value for all involved.

Then, we have another case study on the site for a project that we launched called BreastCancerAwareness.com. We launched the video with 3 video-only PSA’s that ran only on the Internet. The site launch was very successful and the videos went as high as #4 on Google Video. They were all over YouTube, and millions of people saw these videos.

Jeff: I should add to the College Loan [case study]. One of the challenges the client has had is that student loans by their very nature are not the [sexiest] product out there. So how do you generate buzz about a financial product? What we did is, outside of just going to the co-registration platforms or lead generation networks and placing the ubiquitous co-reg offer which we have in place as well, we created a very soft-branded quiz called ‘Think You’re Smart”.

It was designed to be 10 questions that every college graduate should get right, but probably wouldn’t. It turned out to be very viral. People could take the quiz, see how they did, and challenge their peers and friends. What we saw was that even after the media spend that was driving traffic for the quiz stopped, we still continued to receive leads and clusters from different universities. So, it had a pretty viral effect.

So the client base will expand in ‘07 to more verticals or publishers.

Steve: We have a number of clients that are not listed on the site. Some are B2B-specific, some are consumer. We’ll start to release press releases and case studies on each as we go.

We’re not necessarily vertical-specific, although probably 80% of our clients fall into four specific categories. That wasn’t by design necessarily; it’s just the route it has taken. We have a number of clients in the auto after-market space.. So, anything that is made for the vehicle after you’ve bought it, Also, the healthcare space, both consumer and pharma, travel, and finance have been good categories for us.

But my point here really is just that we’re open to working in any number of spaces, and we apply learning from various organizations in various categories to others.



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