Marketing Buzz 02/02
Interim marketing managers, new online ad counting standards
What a Deal!
You need some marketing expertise on your team, but you
can't afford to hire a full staff. Now might be a good time to
look into an interim marketing manager, or IMM-a professional you
hire on a temporary contract basis for a specific project.
Independent contractors are nothing new, but the recession is
causing some serious budget-trimming. With so many marketing
departments feeling the cuts, there are more marketers freelancing.
"This time last year, our demand [for IMMs] exceeded our
supply, and right now our supply is robust," says Michelle
Boggs, co-founder of McKinley Marketing Partners Inc., an IMM
placement firm in Alexandria, Virginia. "We have more talent
[available] because of the market shift."
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That kind of superior marketing talent helped out during two
recent product launches for Outtask Inc., an ASP also in
Alexandria. Even with a full-time marketing department in-house,
Outtask founder Tom DePasquale, 41, counts on the specific skills
IMMs can bring to the table. "In the case of product launches,
when you have an awful lot of stuff to do in a short period of
time," he says, "you hire an IMM and get their skills
and, in some ways, their Rolodex-so you get the best of both
worlds."
Calculating Clicks
If you sell ad space on your Web site, take heed-new guidelines
for counting the number of times an ad is viewed online were
recently released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) in
New York City. These guidelines are meant to end count
discrepancies between Web publishers and advertisers, a move that
could reportedly affect hundreds of millions of dollars in online
ad revenues. According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers study
commissioned by the IAB, revenues for the online ad revenue
industry are estimated at nearly $8.2 billion.
The voluntary standards are meant to streamline the counting
process by outlining standards everyone can follow. They stem from
the fact that methods employed by advertisers and Web publishers to
measure "click-throughs" (the number of times users click
on an ad) are not universal and can lead to contradictory
results.
For the latest guidelines and measurement tools, check out the
IAB Web site at www.iab.net. The site also offers tools, such as a
glossary of interactive advertising terms, guidelines for rich
media ad formats, and a master list of spiders and robots (programs
to collect Web page data).
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