RBC Internet Conference Notes

I am attending the RBC technology, media, and communications conference.  The meeting is very well structured and has a fantastic format for both private and public company CEOs.  The Of all of the many conversations that I had and the panels that I sat in on today, I most enjoyed the "Lead Generation Comes Of Age" panel. 

The panel opened with some interesting data:

• Online lead generation is a $1.6 billion industry
• 165% growth over the last several years
• Projected to be $6 billion by 2012
• Lead gen represents 7% of total online budgets
• Verticals that are leading the lead gen category:
• Education
• Financial Services
• Automotive
• Real Estate

The panel included CEOs from the following companies:

• Reply.com - Built a lead gen exchange to address the discrepancy between supply and demand that exists today in the space.
• All star directories - education focused lead gen
• Vantage - large online lead gen player (with an education focus)
• Mediawhiz - built channel lead gen operator
• Vinyl Interactive

Some interesting factoids of each company

All Star Directories

• 6000 schools
• 50/50 on traffic between SEM and SEO - SEO converts less than SEM
• 333% growth in 7 years of business (~$50 million in revenue)

Vantage

• Education is their largest market.  Additional markets are home services, Finance/Insurance, Consumer
• 175 clients/1K brands
• Focus is on the quality fo the leads
• Manage over 40 million keywords

Mediawhiz

• Founded in 2001
• 130 employees
• Offices in New York, Atlanta, Fort Lauderdale
• Verticals that they focus on:
• Finance
• Research
• Cosmetic (wellness)
• They have three business lines:
• Lead generation
• Search
• Display

They just launched a product called, Scribefire.  It's been downloaded 1.5M times and they claim 150K publishers.  The pitch on this product is that this product enables the long tail to build an ad in 5 clicks.

Some key takeaways from this panel discussion:

• Performance marketing segments will do well becasuse of the clear ROI
• Lots of discussion on how using technology for implementing affiliate cleaning and scoring.  Examples-Vinyl has 2 people in Korea that are scrubbing affiliates.  All of the CEOs that presented mentioned that they had built custom software for maintaining network quality.
• Theme developing around a flight to to quality;  lead prices going up, as conversions going up
• Technology infrastructure is key to weed out bad publishers.  An example is that Mediawhiz has built extensive tech infrastructure in order to scrub data;  approach is totake as much traffic as possible, put it into a lead management system, and efficiently delivering the leads to the advertiser. The key for them is to get a lead from the Web to a person within 5 mins;  they use SMS too directly to sales reps.  There was some data mentioned that a study showed that leads delivered in under 5 mins have 100x or greater chance of converting v. waiting 24 hours.
• Another one that was shocking to me that 50% of the leads generated are not contacted.

Thanks to Grant Gieringer for the invite.  Awesome conference.