Two Bursts for the Price of One
A COMMON PROBLEM that has resulted in the demise of so many dot-com companies is the difficulty of achieving critical mass. You need a large customer base to support your infrastructure. You need a large infrastructure to serve your customer base. And you need millions of dollars to get both.
You also need far more effective direct response print advertising than most dot-coms have deployed.
Perhaps it’s going too far to say that this might have saved many late lamented online outfits. Maybe it’s not.
BurstMedia, seemingly a well-constructed company that sells advertising, places it and collects payment for it for a network of small special-content sites, may be suffering from this critical mass problem.
I could be wrong, but that’s the impression I got as an outsider peering in. When I explored BurstMedia’s site, I found some of its intended categories still vacant. And when I explored some of its member sites, an awful lot of them seemed to have the same ad, one of those phony “You have one message waiting” banners leading to some kind of redemption certificate.
One of their problems might well be money wasted on print ads like the subject of this issue’s makeover.
We see a mailbox. It has a name and number on it. “Levine 9-1/4.” The number is the address, maybe? No, wait. The characters are a lighted LED display. Get it? It’s…it’s like a stock ticker. So Levine is selling for 9-1/4. So far so good.
Above this we see what might be called a headline, barely bigger than the tiny type in the body copy. “The mailbox of Joshua Z. Levine, publisher of www.nextwavestocks.com.”
Now if you’re really on your toes and have plenty of time, you’ll eventually figure out that Joshua Levine is so crazy about stocks he not only operates a Web site devoted to them, he even displays his mailbox name like a stock.
So what? To whom is the ad addressed and what is it trying to say?
Then if you have the patience to fight your way through the usual tiny type at the bottom, you read:
It starts with a passion for something, anything, toasters, tofu, or, in this case, new technology stocks. So you start a Web page. Soon you’re spending all your time either doing the thing you love or writing about it on your Web page. Clearly, passion is as important to the Internet as technology. And we are the only online advertising network dedicated to supporting passionate specialty content publishers. If your Web site is attracting at least 5,000 visitors a month, see how your passion can be a source for profits by contacting us today.
This is astoundingly vague. How do they support these publishers? By sending them letters of encouragement? And isn’t it possible that some of the publishers are showing a profit?
My makeover tells readers how we can help, and explains it with readable copy. As icing on the cake, my second makeover shows how its advertising might also achieve critical mass by attracting more advertisers.
THOMAS L. COLLINS, co-founder and first creative director of Rapp & Collins and co-author with Stan Rapp of four books on marketing, is currently an independent marketing consultant and copywriter.
To send your comments, opinions or suggestions, write me at 424 West End Ave., #11-B, New York, NY 10024, or e-mail me at [email protected].
