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A version of this article originally ran on clickz.com

I’m not sure if everyone read last week that Foster’s beer is moving ALL of its ad dollars online. This needs repeating: Foster’s (Australian for beer, mate!) is putting no money into TV and all of its money online. Apparently, the global premium-branded beverage company isn’t reaching enough of its target audience (males 21-25) on television but believes it can by running videos on heavy.com as well as other Web sites. A major online concern is marketing to consumers who are under the legal drinking age. One of the components of the Foster’s campaign is going to be viral. Now, I look at Ogilvy & Mather’s approach and scream “kudos to you!” However, if there ever was a perfect offer built and in need of a lead generation campaign, this is it. I was planning to write a “how-to” column this week with respect to co-registration, so the Foster’s situation is tailor made. If I were employed for this campaign I would segment some of the media dollars for lead generation (yes, that’s my bread and butter so I’m biased, but bear with me). Here is what I would do for the actual campaign. First, source out lead generation suppliers that can target off gender, age and country. It is important to note here that it must be confirmed that the lead generation supplier can target the offer BEFORE the person sees it, meaning only males 21-25 will even see the offer. This accomplishes two goals: you maintain the branding element to the exact target market, and the client is assured of receiving leads only of the specifically targeted market. Now, when Foster’s gets confirmation from lead generation providers it should go through the specific process of reviewing the Web site or sites that claim they can do this. Call me a skeptic, but a lot of companies in this space are not always 100% forthcoming and honest. Make sure of a couple of things. Are you comfortable with the offer in this process? Is it incentivized? Are there opt-outs? Is the consumer caught in an endless maze of offers and inevitably leaves the process p****d off? You get the picture. Now you have to create your offer, which in this case is ridiculously easy. The promo on heavy.com is to win a date with an Australian model in Las Vegas and they get to choose one from a choice of 10 women! What 21-25-year-old male would NOT want to select this offer? You also have to determine what data points you want the sites to collect in addition to the name (if it’s really needed), e-mail, gender and age. You might want ZIP code – but only if you are going to use it. Don’t ever collect more data for the sake of collecting more data – it will most likely limit your distribution points and/or suppress response. Now for the best part: pricing the offer. I would ask for pricing around the same time as checking about the targeting capabilities, but you should have an idea of what you are willing to test some sources out with. Don’t get sticker shock if the prices vary greatly, just remember you get what you pay for, but keep the big picture in focus here. Do not commit a bunch of units to any source until that source has been tested. This offer should have a very high response rate, so you may get away with pricing below what would normally be considered acceptable. If the take rate is high, then the site is going to make a lot of money even if it is priced “low.” Be sure that each source can send an auto responder e-mail, which is crucial to clean out any bad e-mail addresses. It’s also an amazing marketing touch point (at my company we see opens exceeding 60% and up to 90% on auto responders). Make sure the copy in the email is very simple, something like “Click here to complete your entry to date an Australian model.” Make sure the unsubscribe is clear – “you are receiving this e-mail because you were on X site at Y time and selected the Foster’s beer offer. If you did this by mistake…” You shouldn’t pay for unsubs or bounces. There is a whole “next step” part on remarketing the consumer, which I will cover in another column. In conclusion, I think it’s awesome that Ogilvy pitched Foster’s an all-online budget and the client had the chutzpa to agree. I love their approach and I agree with Aaron O. Patrick of The Wall Street Journal that more big marketers will be following suit. I think that one of the shortcomings in the industry are sources that Ogilvy can approach, but as demand increases hopefully more providers will follow.

Dan Felter is Chief Executive Officer of Opt-Intelligence Inc. and Chairman of the Online Lead Generation Association. He can be reached at dfelter@opt-intelligence.com.

Apathy & Laziness: Key Ingredients for Failing Lead Generation

by Dan Felter

This article originally appeared on clickz.com

If ignorance is bliss, there are a lot of happy people in the co-registration space. Call it funny or pathetic, but it’s truly amazing how so many people don’t know what they are doing when it comes to running lead generation campaigns, including Web sites that are running co-registration offers.

At the risk of being overly harsh, here’s what what I am talking about. We are hearing more and more about how advertisers discovered that their offer ended up in sketchy registration processes (i.e. “I didn’t know my offer was in a Free iPod registration flow and that the user HAD to sign up for my offer. I would have NEVER approved that!”). That’s B.S. You can’t blame anyone but yourself.

How in the world does an offer end up in a process to generate leads, the advertiser PAYS for the leads then claims it didn’t realize it was in there? Well, if you weren’t so lazy and checked all the processes that you are in—in addition to checking all the sites that a network has, regardless of how many—you would know exactly where your offer is running and would have had the opportunity to approve all the sites. Which leads to another point. If you are working with a network that won’t tell you exactly the Web sites and the processes in which your offer is or will be running, do not work with them. Transparency is king, and if a company is not willing to share the names with you, there is something shady going on. Also, if there are multiple “networks” providing you with site lists and you find the same Web site on multiple lists, just contact the site and find out who the liar is and who is telling the truth. (If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard, “You can’t have XYZ site, they are in ABC’s network”–yeah right!).

Now, some companies or co-registration providers out there are probably saying, “How the hell can I manage my campaign so closely?” You don’t have to. It takes 30 seconds to go through a process—just do it. There is perhaps no better example of taking the proper time than the folks at Career Education Corporation (CEC). There probably are no offers out there running on as many affiliate networks and the like than these folks’ offers. There are also probably no offers that can match the metrics they have to hit and the big numbers at stake if they err. However, CEC has taken the time to carefully review what types of sites they want to work with, gone through all the processes and removed any sites they don’t want their offer running on. I have to give them kudos. At Opt-Intelligence, we are very careful with respect to what types of sites we will work with, and CEC even removed some of our sites from the list.

There is another genre of “ignorant” folks out they’re, the ones who are very aware of where their offer is running but consciously turn a blind eye because they have to hit a volume number. Most likely, they realize that the conversions on the back end will suck, but for the time being they will not pay attention to that part (this could also be a bi-product of “conversion metrics is not my job, only volume of front-end leads.” How stupid does that sound in writing?).

The funniest type of lazy/ignorant/apathetic group are sites that claim they “didn’t know what was going on.” I mean, they bring in a third party to run their co-registration, then claim they didn’t realize that party was running opt-outs or forced opt-ins. Believe it or not, we see this all the time. There is one site that told us that it hadn’t chosen a firm other than Opt-Intelligence. Meanwhile, we had gone through their process and there they were, using someone else. (Not sure if they were straight up lying or hadn’t actually gone through their own process.) I mean, how does someone work for a site and not regularly go through their own registration process? In a related vein, this same site was extremely conscious of their user experience, and we warned them against opt-outs and multiple pages that could catch their users in a maze. The site ignored us and ran with a company that uses such tactics. Amusingly, the site’s users created a big backlash and the site pulled the co-registration altogether. No wonder this large social networking site is having problems.

Next time around I will share my letter to New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer regarding co-registration, lead generation and the like. Think what you will of Mr. Spitzer, he’s gotten the attention of the online world in a big way.

Dan Felter is Chief Executive Officer of Opt-Intelligence Inc. and Chairman of the Online Lead Generation Association. He can be reached at dfelter@opt-intelligence.com.

OLGA Chairman Dan Felter has recently signed on with clickz.com to write a bi-montly column on online lead generation. The first column is reprinted in its entirety below. Your comments are encouraged.

Co-Reg is NOT a Four-Letter Word

By Dan Felter

Some call it co-registration, some call it lead generation, while others call it opt-in advertising.

For the longest time, I just didn’t want to say the word in public: co-registration. As soon as I did, quality Web sites and advertisers would literally cringe. One memorable example is when I was with some folks from a top-tier advertising agency in La Quinta last year and mentioned that I run a lead gen/co-reg company. Their eyes rolled, heads tilted and mouths grimaced. Now, this could have been the result of their 4th shot of tequila in about 8 minutes–but I’m pretty sure it was the mention of co-registration. And who could have blamed them? Until quite recently, co-registration was a downright nasty word.

Co-registration occurs during or after someone registers at a particular Web site and is afforded the opportunity to sign up for third-party offers after they enter their demographic information. Why the negative connotation? Co-registration/lead generation is a tricky proposition that tempts even the more honest operators to want to cheat in some way, shape or form.

Back in the day, some providers went so far as doing straight-up data dumps. That’s when a Web site miraculously delivers tens of thousands of advertiser “leads” out of nowhere. Where in the world does a site that gets 1,000 sign-ups a day come up with 70,000 leads over one weekend? That’s a data dump. You also had sites that used opt-outs, hidden opt-outs, forced opt-ins, etc. Either way you sliced it, the leads were of horrible quality and the experience was downright cruel for the sites’ own users.

When I started my business three years ago, I wanted to distance myself from co-registration as far as I could. All I could think of was horror stories involving spam and other distasteful stuff. Honestly, there would be sales calls in which I would try my best to not even mention the words “co-reg.” But after 20 minutes of explaining what my company does, the client inevitably would say, “Oh, you mean like co-registration?”

Now, online lead generation, which includes co-registration, is growing like wildfire and will most likely clip a billion-dollar piece of the Internet advertising pie this year. Last year, revenues in the space grew a whopping 290% to $753 million, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau. No other segment of the online world even came close to that increase. Some of the biggest and most respected marketers and some of the more heavily traveled Web sites have discovered the value of co-registration when it is done the right way.

But as the stakes get bigger, companies had better stand up and take notice. There are still too many companies generating leads with co-reg paths that are not user-friendly, still displaying pre-checked boxes, still tricking the user into opting in, using opt-outs, locking consumers into an endless maze of offers, duping consumers into thinking they have to take “at least one offer,” trapping the user in an endless array of offers or offering phantom free stuff. (The free iPods and $100 in “free” gas schemes are grist for a separate article).

Such ill-advised tactics will continue to dampen opportunity, but they can be overcome. I firmly believe that if quality leads are delivered to enough advertisers, and enough sites use co-registration without sacrificing the user experience, it will generate enough goodwill so that the overall association with the word “co-registration” will be positive. This means more companies must provide high-quality and efficient methods of co-registration, companies that have the big picture and longevity in mind and are not willing to sacrifice quality for the quick buck.

Dan Felter is Chief Executive Officer of Opt-Intelligence Inc. and Chairman of the Online Lead Generation Association. He can be reached at dfelter@opt-intelligence.com

The first point we make in our “Tips for Advertisers, Agencies, and Marketers”
Guidelines for success with Co-Reg campaigns, is for advertisers to ALWAYS know exactly where their offer is running. We strongly believe that there needs to be advertiser driven controls on where, why, and how offers are being displayed. There’s bound to be a lot more written about this subject in both the near term and the long term. Kate Kay offers interesting insight in her article on ClickZ.

Consumer interest in online auto shopping continues to soar. In fact, over 50% of all car buyers start their search online. It’s the preferred method for getting information and being knowledgeable about ones purchase before going to the dealer. Auto manufacturers offer detailed information to support the premise that an informed buyer is more likely to purchase. Nearly 20 million prospective customers searched for cars online last year but most closed the deal in person. To convert these searchers to buyers, it’s important to provide dealers with accurate leads quickly. Leadverifier shows how they improve closing ratios and sales productivity while reducing lead acquisition costs for car dealers in this recent case study. Click here to read the full text.

According to the Annual Internet Revenue Report 2005 conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers sponsored by IAB, lead generation was the fastest-growing segment of online advertising in 2005, with revenues increasing to $753 million.

• Online ad revenue for 4Q05 total $3.6B
• 5% from lead generation

• Online ad revenue for 4Q04 total $2.7B
• 3% from lead generation

• Online ad revenue for CY05 total $12.5B
• 6% from lead generation

• Online ad revenue for CY04 total $9.6B
• 3% from lead generation

All of us in the lead generation space foresee continued rapid growth as more marketers come to realize the benefits and revenue potential from opt-in consumer and business leads.

Last night was our first official Founding Members event in San Francisco. It was a great crowd including members of the media from ClickZ, DM News and Revenue Magazine. OLGA’s Chairman, Dan Felter, spoke about the organizations current activities involving policy matters and standards as well as future plans for seminars and best practices guidelines. Thanks to all of the participants for making the first OLGA event a success. Special thanks to the folks at Azie for delicious food, fine wines and great service.

The goal of our association is to encourage communication within the Co-registration and online lead generation business. It is through our cooperative efforts that we can continue the growth of our collective businesses and provide services that are in the best interest of advertisers, publishers, and especially the consumers.

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