Tales from the (marketing) Darkside (is there any other kind?)

Looking back to my marketing experience over the past decade, I've sold many things to many people both on- and off-line.

Here is Part I of a personal journey of high- (and low-) lights of my online marketing career so far....

There are some marketing I've done that I am very proud of --- like my entrepreneurial student business I ran as an undergrad selling and delivering the New York Times to students and faculty. In 1997, I created a crude but effective columbia.edu hosted website that students could order subscriptions and sent their orders through inter-campus mail (a few brave souls sent me their CC info via email by "securely" breaking the numbers up in several messages --- this was of their own volition!). This was a business I devoted my soul into. I even sent email confirmations of orders via my personal student email address. It was a great way to get my hands dirty and learn using multi-channel strategies to connect with customers (Inter-campus mail, Campus email, Columbia website, Sign-up table on steps of Low Library etc.)

Others, not so proud... Yes, I had my hand at marketing some fairly cringe-worthy products, such as this collector plate featuring none other than the Pillsbury Dough boy.

My first job out of college and I found that my Ivy League education prepared me little for the challenge of marketing collectible "gems" like this. The business model was 99.9% offline and at the time, the online channel was simply not a priority. My company used sophisticated database mining and all types of offline marketing to push these very niche products to tight, product-defined offline mailing segments. But beyond the Herculean direct mail campaigns, publication ads and inserts, the company website was essentially an after-thought.

I (and to a much larger degree, my ex-company) made a lot of money doing this but it was not my dream to apply my marketing skills and passion towards these disposable trifles in a fairly crude and inefficient channel. I would order trailer trucks full of marketing mailers with the tacit knowledge that 1-2% response would be called resounding success (while 98% of the mailing was simply junk-mail). This was mailings by the millions. The direct mail and catalog industry was one that I did not see long-term growth (I liken it the current newspaper industries' struggles to remain relevant with its customers).

So once I paid off my Ivy-League sized tuition loans in just 2 years, it was time to move on.

Now with the rise of targeted SEM and other long-tail mining strategies, I can see enormous potential in these "outlier" products in the Internet space. While I am not privvy to my ex- company's current strategies, I hope that SEO and SEM are core to tapping the niche audience out there that would love to get their hands on that Doughboy plate.

(to be cont'd)