» uk-netmarketing: roundup: 14-07-2000

To be an Emillionaire
UK-Netmarketing Weekly Round-up - July 14, 2000

You might have though a show giving away £1m investment to a prospective Internet business might have caused some grumbling on UKNM. The launch of Channel 4’s Emillionaire show was met with surprising ambivalence, perhaps everyone is too busy working or jaded from the plethora of new media TV shows on our screens.

Robin Edwards commented on the first show, "Watched bits of it. Thought the composer thing was more suited to the numerous applications that already do it (dance ejay etc). Missed the middle one due to teaching my baby boy how to laugh (far more entertaining). The third one seemed the most likely to succeed though after hearing the summaries. Obviously the panel disagreed, hence the audience disagreed. I particularly liked the bit where Michael Grade said something was an original idea, closely followed by his colleague saying that it wouldn't work because so many others were doing it already... Anyway, the format was crap, and so was the content. Nice bit of sponsorship for the web company that did the mock-ups and the ad agency that did the, um, posters? Thankfully this now frees me up for 4 hours this week as I don't feel the need to watch again."

Dan Calladine suggested an alternative scenario, "I started to watch it, and got as far as composer.com ... Then I gave up, because I've videoed Passport To Pimlico earlier, and wanted to watch that. They could have done a great Ealing comedy about e-commerce: Alec Guinness is a milkman, working for a dairy run by Hubert Lom. One day in the pub he meets Sid James, a venture capitalist, who persuades him to go it alone, turning his milk float into an e-fulfilment service. Pretty soon they're delivering things all over London, much to the chagrin of the Post Office, run by Stanley Holloway & then their accountant, Peter Sellers, looks at the books, and realises that the money's about to run out..."

Michael Trott, prompted by the ebusiness advertising around the show, commented on the most recent batch of website ads. He wrote, "Forget Breathe and Freeserve’s arty stuff - any ad that says don't visit this website in such an amusing way has my vote. Oh, except I haven't actually visited maxtrad.com, I just love the ad. Strangely I did visit bananalotto.co.uk just to see what they are playing at but didn't have a go - I'm too British I suppose - anything that says win a million for free is too frightening for me. I put it in the bepaid.com category along with spamming and Exchange & Mart get rich quick schemes."

Dug Falby added, "What do y'all think about Kelkoo's ad? Seems like it identifies what the product does, what its benefit is and who it is for. It feels like it's harking back to the heady days of 1959 when headlines and visuals started working together (think small) to get messages across. Of course, try as I may, I couldn't remember the name until I had seen it ten times (oh well). But on a slightly serious note, the fact that the commercial internet is comparatively new doesn't seem to me a good reason to forget forty years of advertising best practise ;-)"

Michael Trot, obviously keen on this topic, replied, "Think small? If you mean the two chaps in a toilet advert, that's not the message I got! It's actually a rip-off of a laser printer advert from the early 90's two guys covering themselves with respectively A4 and A3 sheets of paper. The Advert was for A3 laser printers. Call me insecure, but I find that 'size matters' approach tacky, but my 16-year-old son thinks it’s a funny advert. If it used women's breasts there'd be a flood of complaints."

Everyone knows the cost of creating a consumer brand is enormous, but some websites have managed to ease this with effective viral marketing. Chas Linn asked, "I understand that QXL got massive by word of mouth - no huge advertising spend on TV ads. Anyone know of any case studies for this or any other low cost start-up marketing models?"

Andrew Mackie responded with, "I interviewed Ybag.com for MarketingSherpa.co.uk a couple of weeks ago - they made the decision to launch without expensive ad campaigns (in particular, TV), exploiting cheaper media (like classified ads) instead."

Tim Ireland cited another example, "Sure - while www.another.com did make a significant spend early this year, a large portion of its users resulted from viral marketing (a tag attached to every outgoing email). This is common enough in itself (just about every web-based email provider does it), but is much more powerful when combined with the novelty of the email address(es) created by another.com users. Even without this - how many times have you seen an email address and been curious enough about the message/sender/domain to carve out the part after the '@' and check out what's hosted at the domain? Personally, I do this all the time - and another.com stats show that many others do too. Of course, not all folks are this smart - especially MPs (but this is another marketing story in itself): http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/10504.html"

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