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| Will For The Win |
One of the greatest gigs of my life ran for five and a half years, with an annual revenue rate in my department from $4 to $14 to $40mm in the first three years. I learned more there than I have at any gig before or since, and formed some of my greatest friendships and relationships in business. Somedays, I really think someone could make a movie about that company.
And it all fell apart, shortly after the lawyers came.
First, some background. My role at this company was to lead custom ad creative projects for behaviorally targeting ad placements. Our final product was a proprietary ad format that was co-branded for the advertiser and the ad company. So our clients could provide their own art, but waiting for that would delay go lives, and usually leave money on the table, since they were not attuned to this kind of work. It was also a "white hat" moment for the ad company, since we were providing "free" creative... with the caveat being, of course, that the cost of doing the art for the client would be more than covered by greater performance.
Our business was, however, highly controversial. We delivered ads that were based on the user's clickstream, in a medium with 100% deliverability and viewability -- a targeted center square pop up browser window, or, less often, a sliding window in the bottom right, or an additional window that was given less priority than your current browser. The ads were the price that you paid for downloading a supported application.
My company believed that since consumers had chosen to take on these additional ads (and confirmed this choice on a significant number of confirmation screens), and that since these ads were appearing in their own browser windows, an aggressive display model was justified. We also made uninstalls as easy as possible; 2 clicks and a simple wizard, which took less than a minute on a decent connection, would send you on your way without our ads.
Millions of users downloaded our application, and millions uninstalled it. So this seemed pretty cut and dried internally, and to the venture capital that backed us, and the hundreds of clients that used us for lead generation.
To the e-commerce and content sites that triggered these ads, and believed themselves to be negatively impacted by this business?
Not so much.
Lessons learned?
1) Do not trust anyone to read anything.
To get our stuff required significant time and interest, mostly though clicking on agree statements. Uninstalling the work was a simple matter of using Add/Remove Programs (it was only a Windows product, by the way). We told consumers how to shut down the application on every ad we ever ran. And to a significant portion of the audience, and in more courtrooms than anyone should ever be in, none of that mattered, because...
2) Take point, take pain.
"Take point" is an old military term that describes moving to the most exposed, or lead, position in a live combat exercise. As the leading provider in a new advertising method, my old start up took point for old-school media content providers who needed an easy "hell in a hand basket" column to write, any activist who might equate e-commerce with intimate speech, and, well, anyone who wanted to tell you what the Internet was, and was not, for.
The funny part is that, if you look at what's done with cookies and profiles now, our position was pretty much proven correct by history. But many of the companies that have profited from this atmosphere didn't get to wear the tar and feathers that we did.
3) Your best analytics are not your first analytics.
Over 50 different programs drove sign ups to our application under an aggressive distribution campaign. Most of those applications were judged on cost per lead. Only much later, when we saw revenue per user per month at a channel level, did we learn just how little some of those low cost per leads were generating for us, and how the poor lead list was also the most likely to get loud with complaints. Cheap leads can be very expensive.
4) If you don't want it read out loud in a court of law, don't put it in an email.
Legal discovery is a phase where your company's communication systems can be utterly shut down in a massive search for anything that might be of relevance to a case. It's also about as conducive to doing business as turning off the power while letting loose vermin, and about as much fun to live through. By the way, once you are served with a discovery order, deleting those emails is the same as the wilful destruction of evidence. So the "cover up is worse than the crime" cliche is accurate.
Having gone through this once, I've got the lingering lifetime habit of writing "rhymes with beagle" in response to dicey discussions, and picking up the phone to close a thread. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I suspect I'm not the only person from those days to have this habit. Needless to say, you don't need to use email in a way that puts your business at risk.
5) Negative actions will define a brand more -- much, much more -- than positive ones will.
To many who were in business during my company's rise, the eventual failure of the enterprise was something to cheer. After all, the end of an aggressive advertising medium rarely causes much in the way of regrets, and it's not as if our critics were hoping for our successful IPO. Our brand was defined by the method, and bad PR and lawsuits, much more than for anything else.
But for those of us who worked there, there was little in the way of angst or mixed feelings. We knew about our charitable works, how amazing our engineering achievements were, and the strength of our hires. To this day, I draw on the insights derived from the data, and rely on my fellow alumni in the industry to provide me with leads and references. I'd hire just about anyone who worked there in a heartbeat, and honestly, there's no finer praise that I can bestow on a co-worker.
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You've read this far, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I also welcome email to davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or you can use the top right form on this page.
In addition to copywriting, direction and strategy, we also provide design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. Tell us what you need done, and your budget, and we'll work out an RFP. I also welcome email at davidlmountain at gmail dot com.
