Re: UKNM: ..end of the personal touch? (long fiction alert)

[Jim Sterne]

At 12:28 PM 10/22/98 , Ray Taylor wrote:


>And as for robots doing the work, I have already said that I'm all in favour

>of it. But people who are in the technology business ought to try to

>understand the relative values of a useful tool, and the craftsman who

>wields it.


On that note, I figured it was time to toss a fiction bomb

into the mix and see the reaction. This bit is from a book

I wrote in 1997 called What Makes People Click. It's the

bit of fluff I like to put at the end of each of my books.

This one was about advertising online:


---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----


Online Real Time Datastream Control


Looking through an eyeglass-weight display, barking out instructions and

waving

data glove-encased hands, tomorrow's ad maestro manipulates the reach, the

frequency, and message delivered to millions of surfers in real time.


Our maestro sits at the virtual command center located anywhere a phone cell

can hear her. The display shows levels of response across multiple sites to

multiple banners from multiple profile types. With a push of a virtual button,

a literal blink of an eye, the promotion balance is adjusted.


The image of the control panel resembles the angled table of an old analog

recording studio. Dozens of knobs line up across a field of vertical slots,

waiting for a touch to send them higher or lower. But these do not control the

amplitude of the signal coming in. They control the types of people the

message

is going out to.


Each has a label floating over it that grows in brightness the higher the knob

is set. The labels include auto, business, college, computer, education,

entertainment, health, home, and more.


In the background, where musicians would have played and sang, hovers a

mathematical grid, a rubber sheet, waiting to be pulled and stretched by

generated results. It is black and at rest.


The product for this session is WebSim business gaming software. It

simulates a

Web site and puts the player in the Webmaster hot seat. Can you make your

navigation easy enough? Can you keep it updated frequently enough to keep

return visitors returning on the stingy budget you had to spread over servers,


artists, Net connectivity, and Java programmers?


The maestro reaches for the sliders. As she sets each knob, a chart on the far

side of the rubber sheet duplicates her choices with vertical, colored bars

indicating the selected profile. She sets Computers to 80, Internet to 100,

and

Business to 40. Then she reaches for Entertainment and slides the knob up to

the 60 mark, watching the blue bar on the far wall follow her movement

exactly.


She selects from a quiver of banners; a cross-segment marketing message aimed

at everybody-the baseline. She tosses the banner toward the rubber sheet and

nods as it rises and comes to rest up above, hanging motionless.


  WebSim               You're the Webmaster                Click

  Compete for Prizes   The Perfect Learning Environment    Here!


Above and to the left, three gray zeros linger-the banners to be displayed

yet,

the clickthroughs received, and the response rate as a percent of

exposures. To

the right, she dials in a gray 10,000 - the number of images to be shown in

this first test run. At the lower-right, the session budget of $82,800

challenges her to deliver.


At the bottom-left are the figures that show the degree to which the average

clicker follows the banner's path to the final goal of downloading the

software.


She is set. It is time.


She runs through the numbers one more time and decides she really needs to net

$5,000 for this session. It would only take a day, but with all the prep time

she put into it, the banner artwork she envisioned and paid for, and the fact

that the non-complete penalty was going to come out of her pocket meant she

was

at risk. She deserved the reward, but it wouldn't come easy.


Why had she said she could double the response they got through direct mail?

She had still been glowing after her big win with the bond-fund company. She

had read the Wall Street Journal cover to cover for three weeks and just knew

Alan Greenspan was going to make a move. She had that one wired. She walked

away with a big smile on her face and hefty commission.


This one didn't have that kind of background to it. It was just another new

software package in a sea of new software packages. Their mailing numbers were

pretty good and that made them harder to beat.


They had sent out 90,000 pieces over three runs at a cost of $69,300. They got

a 3% response rate and followed up by sending a package costing $5 to each of

the 2,700 responders. The data entry, the diskette, the quick-start guide, the

postage. It added up. All told, they spent $82,800 at a cost of $31.66 each.

Not bad as far as the cost of leads goes.


"I'll take the same budget and return twice the response. You make your

software and documentation available on your Web site and I'll get people to

download it. I'll create all the promotional materials, and personally place

the banners. And my fee will be included."


They took her up on her offer.


The maestro gives one last look at the budget counter and prays for a break.

She is set. It is time.


A handle to her left resembles the brake lever on a San Francisco cable car.

She moves it forward without hesitation and watches the impressions counter


ratchet down to zero. On the ad banner network she's using, 10,000 impressions

is but the work of a moment.


The results of her efforts gleam from the meters.


   Impressions   10,000

   Clicks           200

   Downloads          1


Only a half a percent who clicked bothered to get the software!? She had

successfully ignored the knot in the pit of her stomach up until now. Then she

spots the telling number. Average level of depth: 1. It takes three clicks to

download.


She snaps her fingers and the entire display is gone, replaced by the bridge

page on the client's Web site, the page to which a clickthrough takes you. It

looks fine. It's not the problem.


She flips the goggles up onto her head and looks into her own, physical

monitor

on her desk. She types in the URL for the bridge page and waits. The wait

stretches.


She clicks a picture of her client and settles herself while she waits again,

this time for him to answer the call.


"Well, if it isn't the bionic woman! Nice hat. When are you going to start the

banners rolling?"


"I thought I had. When are you going to free up the load on your server?"


"What are you talking about? Our server's fine."


"Wrong. Check it out on an outside line and see what the rest of the world is

seeing."


"Okay, Okay, give me-a-second-to-switch-to.... Oh, my."


"Oh, your."


"Hang on. Okay, I killed it. It was a backup!"


"At two in the afternoon? What's the matter, can't you tell your AM and your

PM?"


"That's very strange. Why would somebody be messing with the time of day?"


"The same people who are fixing your Millennium Bug?"


"Damn!"


"Please, there's a lady telepresent."


She flips the goggles back down and waves her colleague adieu. Another snap of

the fingers reconstitutes the controls. With a quick glance at the interest

levels of clickers, she makes a small adjustment to the sliders and gives the

lever another full-throttle shove.


This time she listens more carefully to the telltale pitch. The clickrate

pitch

is a tad higher - that's good - but in the several minutes it takes to run

through another 10,000 impressions, she only hears that sweet little bell ding

three times. The numbers tell the story. Three percent clickthrough, of which

only one percent downloaded.


She gives herself one more test run before opening the floodgates and some

work

is needed. The bridge page loads fine. The license agreement page loads fine.

The download page loads fine. But you have to scroll two clicks down to the

download button. Why hadn't she caught that before?


She grabs at the helpful, friendly, warm, and charming top paragraph and

shoves

it to below the precious download buttons. She smiles and runs the third

round.

The software retrieval rate goes up to one and a half percent. She smiles. The

clickthrough rate is still at 3%. She frowns.


A quick calculation. She has used up a half of one percent of her budget and

realized a tenth of a percent of her target. This is not good. The knot makes

itself known. She studies the surfer interest profiles with all of her

attention.


The rubber sheet is now distended into a shape like the Matterhorn after too

many martinis. There are two of them. She has a large enough sample to spot


the

problem. Those interested in computers responded nicely. Those interested in

the Internet responded very well. Those with a thing for business were

abysmally indifferent and the entertainment crowd was stretched up to where

the

black sheet had gone through all of the other colors and reached a white snowy

peak at the top.


It is time to adjust, and to let out the throttle a little. She sets the

interest sliders accordingly and re-dials the impressions to 200,000. She

rummages through her quiver of banners.


   Master The Web            Forget Quake         Click

   WebSim - Puts YOU                              Here!

   In The WebMaster's Seat


She eases the trolley car lever forward. She wants to feel the response

levels.


It takes longer to run through these banners. She listens as the response rate

resonance turns melodious and the sweet download bell sounds more like a

telephone than a tentative patron at an empty bakery. When it's over, she

starts to relax a bit. A four percent clickthrough with a two percent

download.


She realizes she didn't trust her gut. They told her this game was for older

folks. Business people looking for a tutorial. They said the gaming crowd as

defined by most banner networks were kids. Teeny boppers who wanted to play

shoot 'em up, blast 'em, and watch 'em bleed games.


She knew better. Kids are savvy. Now is the time to prove it. She reaches in

her quiver and grabs a bright orange, animated, in-your-face-ad and tosses it

into position


 Quake Is For Flakes - Master The Web w/WebSim          Click

 Show 'em What You're Made Of                            NOW!

 YOU run the server, design the pages, win the prizes.


Time for the big guns. She steadies herself, dials the impressions to

one-point-five million and eases the level into play. A smile dances

cautiously

across her face. The timbre rises. The sweet bells of the telephone ringing

settle into a steady tone. The sound of the emergency broadcast network on the

radio that signals all is well.


The noise finally quiets and the results are good. She's burned through 42% of

her cash and only brought in 36% of the downloads, but she has a secret weapon

on her side: frequency.


She dials up two million banners. She hits the full repeat button for full

frequency and knows she has the numbers she needs, even before she starts. At

the 5,400 download mark a small light blinks and the music halts. There's no

need to buy any more banner space. She met the contract. The rest goes into

her

pocket.


The next morning she doesn't need to report to her client, they'll know when

they look at their server logs. She need only e-mail the invoice.


There was even enough left over to fix up her own Web site a little. She could

hire some outside help. Maybe she'd wait until the WebSim contest was over and

make the winner an offer.




---------------------------------------------------------

Jim Sterne              Target Marketing of Santa Barbara

jsternetargeting [dot] com

            http://www.targeting.com

Author, Speaker, Consultant               +1 805-965-3184

Internet Marketing & Customer Service Strategy Consulting


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