New tag line: Point. Click. What a waste.
Published on 09/25/2000 under Potpourri
We’ve read a lot recently about amateurish advertising for dot-coms aimed at consumers, but I’m much more concerned about the way electronic marketplaces are flushing money down the cybertoilet. Maybe Internet advertisers should demonstrate basic common sense before we allow them to waste thousands or millions of dollars on fluffy ads that provide no clue as to why we should care about their site. It makes my brain lock up faster than an Apple IIe on steroids.
Virtually every issue of every leading trade magazine is chock-full of these sophomoric efforts. I’m exaggerating, you say? Maybe other e-commerce sites, but not yours? Well, it would be a lot easier to describe the commendable efforts than the atrocious ones. Here are a few examples of ads that make what little hair I have left stand on end.
Here’s one from Time magazine (that’s gotta cost a few bucks) for industrytoindustry (i2i). The headline is, “The click heard round the world.” The copy promises to create “an Internet-spanning network of world-class companies that connects buyers and sellers into an industrial-strength marketplace.” It just doesn’t tell you for what.
Here’s another one for SurplusBIN.com. The headline is, “Introducing the difference between overstock and income.” I’d read you some of the body copy, but there isn’t any.
An ad for Dovebid, the business-to-business auctioneers, proclaims that they are going online with a vengeance. Their full-size, jumbo page ad headline, “Going once, going twice...Sold to the gentleman jumping up and down in front of his computer” is featured with a large photo of a room-sized mainframe computer that hasn’t been pop-ular for a decade or more.
BestRoute. com is offering a chance to win a ’66 Corvette just for visiting its site, which specializes in hard-to-find “electrical, voice and data products,” as if it were obvious to all what those products would be. And BestRoute.com takes orders by phone or fax (in case the Internet thing doesn’t workout, I guess).
Manufacturing.Net urges us to “get in gear” by finding, comparing and buying more than 1.8 million products at one free and comprehensive site. You’ll find complete product specifications from multiple manufacturers while accessing price and availability information. I guess they were too busy getting all that information together to give us any hint as to what kind of products we might expect to find at Manufacturing.Net.
Is there any wonder why many of these sites are struggling? They’re desperate to attract warm bodies, and yet they give us no earthly reason to visit. No, I stand corrected: At PlasticsNet.com, you can find “a wide selection of off-spec resins.” Now, that’s got to be a hot button for any plastics processor.
It would be one thing if buyers were used to shopping online, but they’re not. Breaking old patterns and establishing new ones is tough, so you’ve got to offer strong incentives.
One e-marketplace that seems to have this simple concept figured out is ChemNavigator.com. Their ad offers, “More than 600,000 compounds that you can search by (molecular) structure and buy today.” The body copy further explains how the search process works and who the suppliers are (six of the top 10 chemistry suppliers).
Another one that seems promising is FreeMarkets.com. They’ve run an ad series describing typical equipment you might find and the financial benefits of using their service. Here’s an example headline: “At 11:00 a.m., a global energy company had surplus construction equipment valued at $535,000.
At 1:15p.m., it sold it for $725,000.” The copy assures us that FreeMarkets has been conducting online auctions for Global 1000 companies since 1995.
Chemfinet.com uses a similar approach: “Last month, over the course of TWO WEEKS, a chemist made 7 phone calls, sent 4 faxes, then followed up with another 9 calls in search for a custom chemical that was not commercially available. He eventually paid $54,000 for it. Yesterday, the same chemist posted an online RFQ (on Chemfinet) and received 5 bids OVERNIGHT, buying the same custom chemical to his exact specifi-cation for less than $38,000.”
If all electronic marketplaces would put themselves in their intended customers’ shoes, we’d see a lot more advertising like that; nothing changes when you advertise an Internet gathering place for buyers and sellers. You’ve got to explain how your site will make their lives easier and better, and their jobs get done faster.
And don’t forget about the self-interests of the sellers. Some markets are making the killer assumption that sellers will come if large buyers are involved. It ain’t necessarily so, and the awakening process is about to begin.
So I suggest a new twist on the ubiqui-
tous dot-com ad tag line: Point. Click.
Snooze. Point. Click. Panic. Point. Click.
File Chapter 11.