September 7, 2004

From a smoky 3rd floor Internet Cafe in Kuala Lumpur

Dear Friend & Subscriber,

In today's issue:

-Crocodile confrontation
-Overture takes a beating in Oz
-27,700 miles of Serendipity

The crocodile didn't eat me.

I ate the crocodile.

The only crocodile I met in Oz was the
one in my salad plate - in my Macadamia nut
and crocodile Meat Spinach Salad with
Raspberry dressing.

And I kid you not, it was hands-down the
best cuisine I sampled in Australia.
Absolutely fantastic. (The mashed potatoes
and Kangaroo Meat with gravy were outstanding
too - Roos are kind of 'gamey' tasting,
but that's fine by me.

There was only *one* part of the X10 seminar
that wasn't received with tremendous enthusiasm,
and that was Overture.

(Overture, Google's rival search engine in
the Pay Per Click game, powers Yahoo, MSN
and many other search engine. Originally
GoTo.com, they pioneered the PPC concept
which has totally revolutionized the web.)

Overture sent a couple of representatives
to the seminar to give a presentation, and
things started going downhill when a woman
who's relatively new to this stuff asked
a rather innocent question:

Attendee: 'Let's say my business does window
screen repair and there's suddenly a hailstorm in
Sydney, and I want to get on the web right away
and advertise that I repair hail-damaged windows.
How long does it take before my ad appears?'

Overture: 'Why would you want to do that?'

Attendee: 'Because I'd like people to come to
my website right away and have me fix their
screens because of the hailstorm.'

Overture: 'But that's not what you do; you
just fix screens. Your business isn't about
hailstorms.'

Attendee: 'Yes it is! And if there was suddenly
a hailstorm, I'd like them to find my website
right away and ring me up.'

Overture: 'But if your website doesn't have
any pages about hailstorms, we can't approve
your ad. Your website would have to be about
wind screen damage from hailstorms, because we
have very stringent relevancy requirements
so that people who search get only the best
results.'

Attendee: 'So if I put up a page about hail
storm damage repair, how long does it take
for my ad to show up?'

Overture: '3-7 days.'

Attendee: '3-7 days??? Whatever for? People
want to fix hail damaged windows today, not 7
days from now.'

Overture: 'That's why it's really important
to already be advertising with Overture,
even if your bids are really small, so that
if something like this happens, you can
increase your bids and become more visible,
which only takes 2 minutes. We only charge
you a minimum of $25 per month. Otherwise
your ads would need to be approved by our
content editors, which takes 3-7 days.'

Attendee: 'OK, so let's say my ads are already
running and I just want to change them to
say I repair hail damage, how long would that
take?'

Overture: 'Why would you want to do that? Your
ads already say that you repair windows.'

Attendee: 'Because if a hailstorm just happened,
and people would be thinking about hail damage.'

Overture: 'Why would you want to do that?'

Attendee: 'Because we're marketers!'

Overture: 'You need to understand, we have
a very stringent editorial process to make
sure that only ads that meet our 80 pages
of content requirements are approved, and
people who search only see the most relevant
possible listings from our advertisers.'

And so it went. 'Overture, we want your
service to be instantaneous, not take 3-7 days.'
'Oh no, Mr. Customer, our editors know better than
you and we're not going to let your ads show
up right away.'

Needless to say the conversations in the
terrace after that particular session was over
were... um, pretty humorous.

This was accented by the fact that on Friday
I had just built a Google campaign for a brand
new product, live in front of our audience,
in about 10 minutes.

It was for Ken Giddens' 'Make Your Dog Stop Barking'
book, and on Sunday I came back having successfully
tested five different ads. The response to various ads
had shown us that people are more interested
in getting their neighbor's dog to stop barking
than getting their OWN dog to stop barking.

Pretty useful piece of info, don't you think?

The audience loved it. It was the speed of
the process that made the example so useful.
Had we used Overture, the ads wouldn't have
even started showing until after the seminar
was over. A lot can happen in 3-7 days,
you know.

The representative from Overture said that
some terrific improvements are in the works,
but bypassing the 3-7 day editorial review process
is most definitely not one of them. She stated
flatly that they will never change that.

Now honestly folks, I would LOVE for Overture
to be instantaneous like Google is. I love
a good competition, especially when I'm the
customer.

I would love to see Overture improve (or should I
say fix?) their system. And regardless of their
flaws, if you're advertising successfully on Google,
you should definitely try Overture. You might
double your traffic that way.

But Overture won't listen to their customers.

I think I know why.

It's because they can't.

Why can't they?

Because they don't control their own destiny.

Overture's partner sites control their destiny.
They HAVE to police all the content, because it
gets shown on other companies' sites. All the
content that Google syndicates gets approved
by a human editor first, too. But on Google
itself, listings show up immediately. This
makes all kinds of fantastic testing and
experimentation possible on Google that
cannot be done on Overture.

I suspect that a shark tank full of lawyers
makes it impossible for Overture to listen to
its advertisers, who give them over a billion
dollars a year.

This is a big, big problem for Overture, and
if they don't solve it soon, they're going to
have even bigger problems. Here's why.

Everyone knows that Microsoft is eyeing the
search market like a famished Australian crocodile
watches a potbelly pig. Google and Overture figured
it out first, Bill Gates missed out on search,
and MSN hopes to take back what Mr. Gates believes
was rightfully his all along.

So the pundits pontificate about what Microsoft
will do to Google. But Google's not so vulnerable
to Microsoft.

Overture is.

So here's what Microsoft does:

They go to every advertiser whose listings are
syndicated on MSN through Overture and they give
them a ground floor opportunity to advertise on MSN
instead. They know who all these people are -
after all, the results are showing up on their
own search engine every day. Right?

Gates always said, 'Keep your friends close and
your enemies closer.'

So MSN gets started selling PPC, and then MSN
goes to all the other search engines and offers
them 100% of the money instead of 1/2 or 2/3rds
of the split. What sane businessman would turn
that down?

Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if the next version
of Windows had an 'Advertise your business
on MSN' icon on the desktop.

Overture would have only Yahoo left as a partner,
because Yahoo owns them.

It's the sort of Bill Gates style coup that
destroyed Netscape, and it's just waiting to happen.

Because remember, Overture doesn't own the
eyeballs, their partners do. And Overture
advertisers aren't nearly as 'in love' with
Overture as they are with Google. Overture
isn't a cult phenomenon; Adwords is.

Please understand, I don't *want* this to
happen. I don't have any affection for Bill Gates,
believe me. But this scenario could play
out if Overture doesn't change with the
times. I would LOVE to see Overture provide
us the kind of instantaneous creativity
that makes Google AdWords so addictive.

(Once again, if you're successfully advertising
on Google and not Overture, you're probably
making a mistake. Check out Don Crowther's
excellent Overture and PPC book at
http://ppc.www.makeyourwebsitepay.com.)

T h e X10 S e m i n a r

I'm biased so I'm probably not the best guy
to ask. But in my opinion, a more thorough
Internet education for both beginners and
advanced marketers has never been provided
anywhere. Every single speaker delivered
3+ hours of his very best & latest content
with no pressure to pitch a product. And every
student went home with everything on CD
so they can listen again. I heard nothing but
rave reviews from attendees.

Stay tuned for information on the videos,
which will be available soon.

27,700 miles of S e r e n d i p i t y

This morning I landed in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia. Right now it's noon in a cybercafe
on the 3rd floor of some crazy building downtown.
It's kind of dark in here and there's rap
music playing and video games. This computer
I'm typing on has annoying adware that keeps
popping up every time I do a search.

How did I wind up in a Malaysia cybercafe?

By deliberate accident, really.

My wife's brother Alan runs a relief
organization that helps kids in 3rd world
countries and they have a project in Nairobi
Kenya. I'm kind of curious about this, so
I asked the travel agent if I could go from
the US to Australia to Nairobi first, before I
go back home.

Basically he said 'If you want to get to
Nairobi by any sane, logical route, it's going
to cost you an extra $6500.'

Six grand? I don't think so.

But Peter says 'Let me see if I can get you
there another way.' So he checks and shows
me how I can save $6500 if I fly from Chicago
to Fiji, to Brisbane, to Kuala Lumpur,
to Singapore, to Dubai, then to Nairobi and
to London and back to Chicago.

That's a complete trip around the world,
which is 27,700 miles.

Yeah, I know... to some people that sounds
like a desolate wasteland of airplanes and
airports and horrible jetlag. And very, very strange
food.

But to me that sounds like fun. Just have
to make sure I spend a couple of days in
each place.

So I said to Laura, 'Ummmmm.... I know
you're already going to be keeping four kids for
a week and a half... um... what would you think
if I also spent an extra week and visited Malaysia
and Singapore and United Arab Emirates?'

She says, 'Hey buddy, you already owe
me so bad from the last two trips - what the
heck, you might as well. Just remember
though, you're going to owe me big time now.'

So here I am.

The unplanned parts of any trip
are usually as good, if not better than
the stuff you plan. So I'm all for serendipity.

Next stop: The Petronas Towers, which are
the tallest buildings in the world. Oh, and gotta
grab some Panang Curry...

Almost forgot: it's Labor Day in the US -
hope you're having a great day off!

Perry

P.S.: Not making this up - a few hours after
the Overture discussion about the hypothetical
hail storm in Sydney... there just happened
to be a hail storm in Sydney. Broke a few
windows, as I understand.

Go on to the next installment: Kamikaze Street Vendors, Globalization & Z-Man