Rich LeFurgy has been a board member, advisor or investor in over fifty-five online advertising companies.? Drawing from a seventeen-year ad agency career in New York, he was head of sales at Starwave and the Walt Disney Internet Group (ESPN.com, NFL.com, NBA.com and ABCnews.com) and a venture capitalist in San Francisco, prior to starting advisory firm, Archer, a multifaceted advisory services company assisting early stage online media companies, in 2004.?
Rich has served on company boards as a director (Blue Lithium and Associated Content, both sold to Yahoo), provided advisory services to large and small online advertising companies (Google, AOL, Blue Lithium, Glam and Placecast) and personally invested in promising online advertising startups (Ad Relevance, sold to Nielsen NetRatings, Grouper/Crackle, sold to Sony and Blue Lithium).? He has long been a supporter and evangelist to help grow the industry and was the founding chairman of the IAB, the Future of Advertising Stakeholders (FAST) and the Bay Area Interactive Group (sfBIG), and has served on the board of the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), the Advertising Education Foundation (AEF) and the advisory board of ad:tech.? He remains on the IAB board today.
Additionally, Rich has received ad:tech?s Industry Achievement Award, the IAB?s Lifetime Achievement Award, was inducted into Advertising Age?s Interactive Hall of Fame? and was recognized by USA Today as the ?Johnny Appleseed of online advertising.?
?
Rich LeFurgy, you are partner or founder of Archer Advisors?
General Partner and founder, Archer Advisors.
We?ve known each other for a long time.? How did you get into this business?
Well, it?s interesting you bring this up because I was reminded of my beginnings today when I reconnected with someone on LinkedIn.? I started my career in the ad agency business in New York at NW Ayer on Madison Avenue and stayed there for seventeen years, which was quite unusual in the agency business.? One of the hottest topics in marketing between 1993 and 1994 was the Information Superhighway, and coincidentally, one of my biggest clients was AT&T, which was a big participant in the discussion.? I was the person in agency meetings who started lighting up when the concept of the Information Superhighway was brought up.? At the same time, everybody?s eyes would kind of glaze over and roll back in their heads because I did this so often.? Then during fall of 1994 the AT&T corporate group starting running the first banner campaign on the web on Wired.com, the ?You Will? campaign, and this was the first time I had truly seen the Internet, online advertising and the browser.? I was instantly hooked.? I told myself, this is it!? This puts marketing all together.? I am leaving the ad agency business.?
In retrospect, I did this for a couple of reasons.? First, the working environment in the agency was somewhat dismissive of online advertising during the mid 1990s.? Television ruled the day and is still one of the heavy hitters in the industry, but nobody really wanted to challenge TV since it was Madison Avenue?s cash cow.? I ended up leaving New York and joined Starwave in Seattle.? The biggest name in New York was Pathfinder at Time Warner, but I didn?t see my transition from the ad agency to Pathfinder to be an easy one, so I found something else. Second, I was excited by the web like I was years ago by advertising in college.
And at the time Starwave had packaged together ESPN and a couple other properties right?
Right, ESPNetsportszone.com, later to be known simply as ESPN.com and OutsideOnline.com.? Now for a fairly unknown but interesting fact, Starwave was actually a content company owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen that licensed the ESPN name from ESPN and got a ton of online promotion in the deal to build awareness.? We had editors, photo editors, writers, marketing and ad sales all built upon a fairly sophisticated content management technology platform, as well as e-commerce platform.? We powered ESPN.com, and together with ESPN we eventually conducted content and ad sales deals with NFL.com, NBA.com, NASCARonline and ABCNews.com.? Eventually our company was bought out by Disney, who in turn is a parent company of ESPN and ABC during the time when we essentially had editorial control over ESPN.com.? I think the folks at Disney had a cow when they found out that Starwave had editorial control over ESPN.com, but at the time ESPN licensed their brand to a number of new technology platforms to generate revenue.
It?s also interesting how I got started in online ad sales.? In the ad agency world I was in the account management (strategy and client servicing) at Ayer and had worked with AT&T, Ralston, Purina, Proctor & Gamble, DuPont, Marriot, Burger King, Avon, along with a whole bunch of blue chip advertisers.? I came across an Advertising Age article while I was on a plane to a new business pitch for the Gillette interactive AOR (Agency of Record) account when I saw a story about ESPNetsportszone.com.? I knew that at Ayer we didn?t have a tremendous amount of sophistication about online advertising internally, it was still early.? When I got off the plane and went into the lobby of the John Hancock Towers building where the Gillette client was, I stayed downstairs and called up one of the names in the article, thus beginning my transition from leaving the agency business to joining Starwave.
And how was it trying to sell digital media and Internet to brands back then?
The whole process was challenging.? There were pockets of folks in various agencies such as MCVBS that were interested in what we were doing, but paying for advertising online was still a new concept.? Most potential clients wanted to put our content on their site to generate traffic rather than buying banner ads, so I spent a good three months pitching banner and sponsorship programs with very little success.? Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the Advertising Age article that I had read stated that ESPN was planning on selling online ad campaigns for $1 million.
After a while the insertion orders finally started to come in as the Internet was growing within the agency world by midsummer of 1995, the time at which ESPN.com was one of the biggest destination sites on the web.? That was also about the time when Yahoo! jumped on the scene and started to grab their share of the pie.? There was no such thing as CPMs or guarantees back then.? A lot of the stuff that people take for granted now, we were the ones to develop it over time and I credit InfoSeek with establishing CPMs, more specifically Molly Ford, who I think eventually went on to AOL with Richard Ward.? The takeaway here is that we were living in a time where online ad sales was the Wild West.
You mentioned that at Starwave you were having difficulties in selling the banner campaigns, but eventually some of the brands turned around.? But then you also mentioned an epiphany when Yahoo came in the marketplace and started doing well.? Were they able to help the brands and the agencies understand the possibilities that were in the space?
I think Yahoo helped in the fashion that they were a reach story.? Throughout history reach has been an incredible component of the media business, so it?s safe to say that Yahoo really helped catapult the industry forward.? Moreover, Yahoo was just an incredibly engaging site because that was when the term ?surfing? was first coined.? One of the counter-intuitive things we learned then was people love to look at multiple sources of information on the web rather than just going to one source.? We initially thought that people would simply visit ESPN.com, bookmark it and never go anywhere else because we were the sports authority offline.? But with the introduction of Sportsline.com and companies such as Yahoo, and Google later on, it was easy for people to obtain as much diverse information as possible.? People now had access to numerous sources on any kind of topic that they wanted.
Do you think that the increasing clutter of competition, as well as the general desire for reach, was the biggest challenges facing web advertising at that stage, or were other things influencing it?
I think the biggest challenge with web advertising back in the mid 1990s was that the concept was just too fresh for anybody to piece everything together correctly.? It certainly can be described as a tale of two cities.? There was a media story occurring simultaneously with a technology story, which created some real tension within the industry.? On one hand, there were great media and advertising programs that online publishers could come up with.? On the other hand, technologists who lacked media background sold the accountability of the web based on click-throughs because this was a metric that could be accounted for.? This was the original sin of online advertising, which was focusing on the click-through and trying to make it the coin of the realm.? In hindsight, this was one of the biggest problems and persists at some level today.??
?
Interested in hearing more of Rich's interview and his views on the business? ?Check out?Internet Ad Pioneers, available now at?Amazon.com in both physical?and?Kindle?versions!!
?
?
Source: http://www.treffiletti.com/blog/2012/12/internet-ad-pioneer-rich-lefurgy-of-archer-advisors.html
84th annual academy awards beginners 2012 oscars the shore meryl streep oscar wins sasha baron cohen oscars oscar winners
No comments:
Post a Comment