SPOTLIGHT ON

Adrian: Can you tell us a little about yourself?

Jason: I got my start in online advertising almost ten years ago. We started building sites back around the dot boom days. We were the guns for hire, and we started building e-commerce shopping systems for different companies.

We also started building small sites like e-book sites, and we caught the eye of a couple companies who saw we had some target traffic and wanted us to get into lead generation.

Adrian: So what kind of e-book sites were you building?

Jason: Things like credit repair, how to get a government grant, raising money for venture capital, scholarship guides, dating books or divorce forms. It was any gamut of things that seemed to be high searchable items on the search engine in those days.

As we got those in gear, it was a sign of the times that less and less firms were out there hiring companies to build dotcom systems or technology for them, or at least we didn’t find as much excitement in those particular areas.

We got a phone call from Dion Speckling at Lexington Law Firm, and he saw our site ‘BuildMyCredit.com’ and asked to see if we could turn some traffic to him for credit repair leads. This was in November 1998, and we started to send traffic over to him.

Adrian: So you were starting to do e-books and information stuff back in ‘96?

Jason: That’s correct. Well before things were really getting engaged in the marketplace. We didn’t get heavily into the online marketing until after the millennium hit.

Adrian: Had you ever heard of lead generation as a business before?

Jason: It wasn’t a marketplace we were very skilled in. So we stumbled along. We didn’t know what a registration path was. We didn’t know what a co-reg path was. Our first registration/ co-reg path literally was a Java Tree with a bunch of ‘yes’/ ‘no’ buttons on it. Every time you would say ‘yes’, another tree would drop down and you’d say ‘yes’ again and another tree would drop down, and again and again. So we were one of the early pioneers.

Adrian: So how does that lead to where you are today?

Jason: We now focus 100 percent on online lead generation.

We syndicate our revenue path, which we call S.O.R.T. – Self Optimizing Revenue Technology – because it handles all the business model solutions and challenges we’ve found over the past few years of doing lead generation, which is what offer do you show, how do you show that offer, when do you show that offer, how often do you show that offer? We’ve built a system that does that and analyzes the habits of the last 50 people through a site, per site, site by site by site. So it’s completely self-optimizing.

Adrian: Can you send me an example of a ‘SORT site’ so we can see how it looks?

Jason: If you’re at ‘BuildMyCredit.com’, and you went from page one to page two, you’ll actually go into a SORT path entirely. One other place you could go is http://freerewardcenter.com/default.asp?p=1080.

Each one of our sites uses SORT technology. That’s how we make sure that we can always monetize the user, and the traffic for our sites always builds itself up. Our S.O.R.T. technology is powered by a system that we built called CoRegNet. It is the first truly international lead generation platform in the marketplace. It can deal with leads from any country, any language and any category. It can self-optimize them in that particular area.

Each one of our sites is available in multiple countries. For example, if I get a handful of co-reg offers from a particular country and a handful of CPA offers for a particular country, I could open up a country, literally tomorrow. That’s a real big part of how we do business around here. We focus our aspects around the international flavor.

Adrian: So what you’re now doing is taking this S.O.R.T. platform that you’ve built around the needs of lead buyers in the United States, and you’re taking it and internationalizing this platform?

Jason: That’s correct.

Adrian: So your focus is to find lead buyers in as many countries as you can?

Jason: That’s exactly what we do.

Adrian: So in the U.K., for example, what are the markets that people want to buy leads in at the moment?

Jason: Financial marketplace is really going gangbusters over there. It’s kind of like the Wild, Wild West, and people in the U.K. aren’t real keen to work with a guy from New York, or a guy from Florida, unless they know they’ve got some U.K. presence. People are very culturally driven. That’s why we’ve got to be on the ground with our facilities, with our staff, knocking on doors and kissing babies to bring on more affiliates who can drive U.K. international traffic, and more advertisers who are looking.

PrimeQ is positioning itself to be a global conduit, to be the organization that can get you traffic or leads in any country, any language, in any industry.

Adrian: You’re working in so many countries. I can imagine you don’t speak all those languages. How does that work?

Jason: We have people on the PrimeQ staff who speak the different languages. We can speak Dutch, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, English and French.

Adrian: So do you have Chinese lead buyers at the moment?

Jason: We have two staff in China now working on opening up PrimeQ China. We’ve got about six campaigns for the Chinese marketplace that we’re looking to launch within the next couple of months.

Adrian: If someone comes to you and they want travel-related leads for China, how do you go about designing the lead generation pages and then driving the traffic?

Jason: We actually go and farm out the work. Our people who speak the language will negotiate the campaign, get the details in place, and we farm it off to a designer in the marketplace who can design the actual materials. We’ll review them on our end, make sure they’re up to the PrimeQ standards, and then we’ll be ready to launch the campaign.

Adrian: So you’ve got your pages designed, how do you drive Chinese traffic?

Jason: Through these affiliate forms out there. Every single country has affiliate forms. Every single country has affiliates.

It’s no different than you would in the U.S. market or the U.K. market, or any other European or non-U.S. based market. It’s starting a company from scratch, and that’s where the exciting business comes from.

Adrian: So how many countries do you have active lead buyers in?

Jason: Twelve, right now. A year ago we had one.

Adrian: Do you manage all of the lead selling relationships yourself?

Jason: I don’t actually. We handle them mostly from the U.K. We found that our U.K. team is really internationally centric. They understand the European marketplace. They understand it’s national expansion. It’s funny – you can hire a sales team in the U.S. all day long, but getting them to think outside of the U.S. stereotype is difficult to do.

Adrian: What’s your long-term competitive advantage?

Jason: Firstly, our technology. We’ve been preparing for international growth for almost two years, and we’re preparing our systems, our technology, and our sites to go into the marketplaces appropriately. So opening up a country can be done in literally a few moments time, versus weeks of more preparation and work.

Then, we’ve got the team assembled for multiple languages as well. Plus, we actually go to the customers. We get on planes, and we see our customers about once a month or once every two months in different locations. So we’re maintaining that strong relationship.

Our main competitive advantage is the fact that PrimeQ will be the only firm that literally can get you into, ten, twenty, thirty or forty countries with one click.

Adrian: Where is the barrier to entry though?

Jason: Time and money is the barrier to entry for us. The barrier to entry for a lot of companies is technology.

Adrian: The guys buying leads from you in the U.S. at the moment, how many of those are interested in international leads?

Jason: Actually, not very many. I would say ten percent. Many people in the U.S. market are still focused inside their boxes.

Adrian: So the vision that you have – is that created by you alone? Do you have a Board of Directors or outside investors?

Jason: PrimeQ is 100 percent owned by myself, and the visions primarily come out of my head late at night.

Adrian: So, let’s say a company wants to work with you for leads, how much do they have to pay you to get started?

Jason: The minimum is going to range, depending on the kind of campaign and the setup involved, from 2,500 to 5,000 U.S. dollars, or in British Sterling it averages about 4,000 British Sterling.

Adrian: Do you do a lot of testing on all your campaigns?

Jason: We do. We do a lot of tests on the campaigns, and S.O.R.T. actually does it for us. S.O.R.T. takes a campaign, puts it in the system and then begins to optimize itself.

Adrian: I wanted me to ask you about the Zip Phenomenon, and how that’s affected your media buying and distribution?

Jason: In the U.S., it practically pushed us out of the market. It was so difficult to deal with because it really came out with a campaign that did not give the greatest quality to our advertisers, made the affiliate pay out to the upwards of a $1.75 per user for an e-mail only campaign, and made it very difficult to compete in every single way, and we saw a drop in traffic.

We tried to run the Zip campaign in the international marketplaces and the affiliates just wouldn’t have it. They didn’t want to see the campaign because they don’t believe that the data is there.

Adrian: Anything else we should talk about?

Jason: We’re always looking for new people here at PrimeQ that have a desire to go global, that are interested in relocating to different countries, different areas that we can plant. That’s an important thing that we’re always looking for. People who understand the international culture, who speak different languages or at least, want to see the world.

Adrian: Well that was very interesting – thanks for the great interview.

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