October 1999

AvenueA Angela

It's a cool life if one can ignore the confrontations between good and evil. Evil Ellen from Anonymous Media Co. (AMC) is unhappy with our banner performance and wants to walk away from the contract, just like that, without the required two-week notice. Here's our email string. The names have been changed to preserve their anonymity.

From the beginning, her email was confrontational.

From: Ellen @ Anonymous Media Co. Only if I receive terms and conditions in one hour. Spend levels per site have changed for Auctions-R-Us, but I am happy to inform you that you made the October buy!!

"You made the buy!" -Ellen

From: Wendy @ DarwinAwards
Great, Ellen! I'm happy to hear that the Darwin Awards made the October buy. You received our terms and conditions on September 21st, and here they are again, signature included. Please return me a copy when your side is signed. How long after delivery of ads will AMC send payments?
Warm Regards, Wendy

From: Michelle @ Anonymous Media Co.
Hi Wendy, The redirects will be coming either tonight or tomorrow morning, we'll get them to you as soon as possible. You'll want to submit payment after the campaign is over. Talk to you soon!

Ten days later, I recieved a curt (and ungrammatical) note from Ellen.

From: Ellen @ Anonymous Media Co. Hi there! I have still recieved no response from you regarding the performance of the Auctions-R-Us campaign. If I do not hear back soon, I will have to cancel this buy. Also, the phone number on the rfp you sent is invalid.Please let me know asap!

"I have still recieved no response from you" -Ellen

From: Wendy @ DarwinAwards
Hi Ellen:
What? What response regarding the performance of the Auctions-R-Us campaign? Give me a call at my new number. I am happy to answer your questions, or to modify the campaign to suit your needs.

We talked on the phone. It was a puzzling conversation with a woman whose facts were not true. I thought maybe Ellen's emails were rude because she found me difficult to reach by phone, so at the end of the conversation, I asked if that were the case. I mentioned that I am always available by phone and by email. But she said she had no trouble reaching me.

From:Wendy @ DarwinAwards
Hi Ellen
I am happy to work with you as needed, to ensure that the Auctions-R-Us campaign is successful. From our phone conversation, I gather that you fear that we are bit behind in impressions served, and also exhibiting a high CPA. To lower the CPA, we have added a text tag-line beneath each Auctions-R-Us banner to increase click-throughs: "Brand Name Bargains Start at $7"

By my calculations, we are exactly on target to reach 1,000,000 impressions in October. Your statisticians were looking at data for Oct 1-3, including two weekend days. Weekends always have less traffic on The Darwin Awards. However, I have temporarily increased the number of Auctions-R-Us banners served by 14% as a good-faith measure.

Please call me any time to discuss the campaign. I am in the office weekday afternoons, and always available through email.
Regards, Wendy

From: Ellen @ Anonymous Media Co. Due to the performance of this campaign, I must cancel this buy effective immediately. Thanks, and if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call! From: Michelle @ Anonymous Media Co. Hi Renee, Attached is the revised IO for the Auctions-R-Us campaign reflecting an immediate out for the October campaign. Please sign and fax back as soon as possible. Thanks Renee!

"Cancel this buy immediately. Thanks." -Ellen

From: Wendy @ DarwinAwards Dear Ellen: I am very concerned that you are unhappy with the performance of the Auctions-R-Us advertising banner campaign. Please tell us what aspect of performance concerns you so that we may correct it. When I discussed performance on the phone with you last Tuesday, the issue was the number of impressions being delivered each day. Analysis of the data showed that we were within a small variance of the correct number. Nonetheless, we immediately increased our AMC impressions by 14%, just to be on the safe side. I wonder if perhaps you are dismayed by the CPA, or equivalently with the click rate? We are concerned with that very issue, as the Auctions-R-Us campaign click rate is dramatically below the average for our site. In an effort to improve matters, on Tuesday we modified our Auctions-R-Us banner presentation to include the hypertext "Brand Name Bargains Start at $7". This change decreased CPA (equivalently increased click rate) by 33%. Our Performance Index improved accordingly. I would like to discuss further ideas for improving CPA. The Auctions-R-Us campaign may be experiencing "banner fatigue". We can correct that by altering the number of Auctions-R-Us impressions shown to each member of our audience. I will phone you Monday at 11:30 to follow up. Regards, Wendy

From: Ellen @ Anonymous Media Co. yes, the cpa is VERY high--1000times higher than what the client wants. unfortunately, the likelihood of getting it in the range the client expects is very unlikely. thanks for your help and effort! oh, and make sure to take the campaign down as you are not receiving payment beyond friday (when we sent the revised i/o). thanks! Ellen

"The likelihood is very unlikely." -Ellen

This clueless woman made no mention of our contract, offered no discussion of performance, and sent a threat that served impressions will not be paid. The rational part of my brain echoed, "But the contract! But the contract! "

From: Wendy @ DarwinAwards Dear Ellen: I am finding it difficult to do business with you. According to your email, Auctions-R-Us expects 1000 times better performance, which means a click rate of 80 per impression. Which is, of course, impossible. You harbor unrealisitc and uncommunicated expectations. You have rejected my efforts to identify and alleviate your concerns. I can neither decipher nor implement such capricious and poorly-defined requirements. Please remember that we are engaged in a business negotiation. We stand ready to meet our contractual obligations. Regards, Wendy

"I can neither decipher nor implement such capricious and poorly  defined requirements." -Wendy

Dear Ellen:

I appreciate your call and your explanation of the Auctions-R-Us buying strategy. I understand that you are not satisfied with our "conversion rate," you think that efforts to improve will fail, and you would like to cancel our agreement. I look forward to discussing your decisions with another member of your company, as we agreed. As I mentioned on the phone, I am off-site this afternoon. Tomorrow, I can be reached in the office after 11:30AM.

Regards,
Wendy

From: Ellen @ Anonymous Media Co. Great, I hope we have a few things cleared up! Trust me, the last thing I want to do is make someone angry, but sometimes I have no other choice than to do what the client asks of me. Yes, it is all about the conversion. Auctions-R-Us happens to have one of the lowest "cost per conversion goals", but all of them are focused on that wonderful number. Hopefully their goal will be easier to attain shortly, as they plan to get some new creative. But in the meantime (unfortunately) they don't give much slack to the publishers. Angela, my boss who is the client manager, is the person whom you should speak with. She knows even more than I do about this particular client, and management issues like these. Thanks, Ellen

"I can neither decipher nor implement such capricious and poorly  defined requirements." -Wendy

So I spoke with Angela, pillar of reasoned intelligence, mitigator of AMC sins.

She blithely assumed that Ellen had implemented the two-week-out clause. I told her that Ellen had not, had instead refused pay for banners served after last Friday. I suggested that Ellen should be fired for misrepresenting the company. And for rudeness. Angela assured me that she would weigh my advice, but that clients always said that Ellen was just great.

We discussed increasing the conversion rate. She explained that Auctions-R-Us pays per bidder. 30% of sites were hitting the goal of $5 each, 40% were within $10, and my site cost $137 per bidder.

I emphasized that I want to maintain a business relationship with AMC because they pay well. She disclosed that their clients included several large companies, and that she also wanted to maintain a good business relationship. I sold her on the idea of decreasing the buy level to increase performance. She seemed impressed with my plan. She asked me to consider Friday to be the beginning of the two-week out notification but stated that if buy levels improved... I agreed.

She asked me to contact Ellen. I vehemently requested another media buyer. She presented Ellen as someone who would be involved in many future campaigns. I acquiesced.

Dear Ellen:
Angela and I discussed a plan to bring the Performance Index to a comfortable level. The problem seems to be "banner fatigue." We decided to scale back the number of Auctions-R-Us impressions to display, on average, only once per visitor, which is approximately 35,000 impressions per week. This is a change to 15% of originally-agreed upon levels, and alters our original contract.

Our website was presumably selected because it performed well for Auctions-R-Us's banners on the DoubleClick network. I anticipate that the revised schedule will allow performance to reach the desired levels.

Our engineer will implement the change this afternoon. Let's analyze the results and discuss the outcome next week.

Regards, Renee

The engineer is me. I also turned off Auctions-R-Us banner displays through Doubleclick and Flycast. Let's hope it all pays off, so my welcome isn't tarnished with AMC, and vice-versa. But I hold zero hope that I can decrease conversion to from $137 to $10 each.

Footnote: My strategy seems to have paid off. The next evening, I received a note from Kyle at AMC extending possibilities of an Upstart purchase.

Footnote: A year later and I haven't seen a single additional campaign from AvenueA, the AMC.

< And Bla-Bla was worse! >

12 October 1999