Bronte Media

I am back from Vegas where last week Jay Weintraub hosted the inaugral Leadscon. One of the speakers said it best: “This is the first conference, of the dozens we sponsor, exhibit and attend, that is actually relevant to my business”.

Despite being a first show, the conference had about 550 people there and was buzzing.

So many people dance around and chat about how Coca Cola and Proctor and Gamble will increasingly take the Internet seriously as an ad medium. And meanwhile the guys at this conference with obscure names like Q Interactive, Quinstreet and Vantage Media and even more obfuscated practices spend the vast majority of ad dollars on the web.

Primarily, if you couldn’t guess by the show name, the conference was about lead generation. Lead generation has a very important role in online marketing. They spend a shitload of dollars on portals, search and vertical sites. And they get paid by lenders, insurers and online universities to do so. Matt Coffin, founder and formerly of Lowermybills commented that the ratio is roughly 50 cents of media spend for every dollar of revenue.

So what did everybody talk about? Here are some of the main themes:

1. Everybody basically hates the ‘Free Ipods‘ guys. That is those who promise a free ipod in exchange for the user signing up to different offers (e.g. a credit card from citibank, netflix service etc.) and getting their friends to do the same.

One speaker said the average lifetime of a free ipod subscriber was 6 months.

2. The conversation has moved from media buying techniques to lead quality and measurement. That is, how can these firms get better at understanding the quality of traffic sources. A lot was said about Lead Scoring and almost every panel brought up the topic. Almost all mentioned eBureau, so they are certainly a firm to watch.

3. Lead exchanges like Leadpoint are a hot topic but are nothing without the largest sources of leads in each category. That is, if lowermybills doesn’t want to play in mortgage, and Quinstreet in education, then they are basically a non-starter. Although they could serve as an efficient entry for advertisers for smaller sites (like mine!).

There are also a lot more exchanges launching. Reply.com for instance is about to relaunch itself as a lead exchange.

4. Tipping point for Lowermybills. Matt Coffin said the tipping point for the company was when they asked consumers to enter their social security number. This weeded out non-serious inquiries and mortgage companies loved the resulting effect.

Interesting in light of Zillow’s launch of a mortgage platform. I think it is a brilliant idea and that is actually something I thought about doing when I was deciding to do Homethinking.

But the reaction at the conference was (predictably) luke warm. But aside from the self-interested haters, there was a theme amongst the conference: there is a huge premium placed on lead quality. That is if lead generator X gave me 100 leads and 2 converted, I am happy to pay $1 per lead say. Now lead generator Y gives me 5 leads but 1 converts. There seemed to be a huge willingness to pay a premium for the later. As in they might pay $40 and when it came time to cute budget they would rather cut the former rather than later.

The reason being the marketing managers are beholden to their call center or reps. And they get a lot of complaints on the high volume, lower converting stuff and are portrayed as heroes when they filter and only give high quality leads.

That’s an interesting point to contemplate, since the same happened for Matt Coffin and Lowermybills in 2003-4.

5. Some news: Jordan Rohan, formerly a stock analyst at RBC Capital Markets and an interesting guy who dug down deep into direct marketing online earlier than most has left to start an advisory business with former AOL head of sales Mike Kelly called Clear Meadow Partners.

All in all a fantastic conference and this will be a huge win for Jay when the smarter people who usually attend Ad Tech and SES figure out they have been overrun with idiots and opt for conferences like Leadscon instead. If you are after other recommendations for conferences, Peter and co at Kelsey also put on excellent shows.