Peg Stocus, president of New York-area contractor KO Electric Fiber & Data, recently had a little lesson in the power of online marketing.

Quite frankly, it shocked her.

It happened when she was calling on a firm that was considering using KO for a large project. "I put my business card down on the table," she recalls. "They took one look at it and said 'is this you?'" Her soon-to-be clients pulled out an authoritative paper on the intricacies of "sound masking installations" of which Stocus's firm does nationwide installations.

The article in question was authored under the careful direction of the New Identities Agency and posted to hundreds of web sites and referenced in thousands of newsgroups.

"They told me they had been using the paper as their Bible of sound masking," she recalls. "They couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it!"

Not long before that meeting, Stocus had hired Internet traffic, marketing, and branding consultant Jim Bock and his New Identities Agency to market their company-she just hadn't expected his work to generate these kinds of results so quickly. In fact, like a lot of people, she had grown a little skeptical of Ad Agencies and the Internet as a cost effective marketing tool.

"We had been casting around for years," she says. "We worked with all sorts of people who called themselves marketing professionals. But we've never had results anything like this. My God, this really works!"

So what happened? How was New Identities able to get such great results, while more and more big Agencies are failing miserably?

The answer is simple: New Identities focused its efforts on "Pin Point Direct Marketing" and as a result was able to provide a positive return on investment within 12 months.
Savvy Marketing for Savvy Consumers

At the core of New Identities' "Pinpoint Direct Marketing™"- give people what they are looking for when they are looking for it.

"Pin Point Direct Marketing™" - is in direct conflict with traditional "Interruptive Marketing"- which gives you something you aren't looking for when you are expecting something unrelated.

"The big difference," explains Bock, "is that Pin Point Direct Marketing gives you a solution when you are thinking about a problem."

For example, let's say you are sitting at a table in an airport restaurant eating a bowl of complimentary pretzels. After you toss a few salty pretzels in your mouth, you notice the table tent which says "Reward Your Curiosity - Try a Vanilla Coke Today".

That's an appropriate message at the right time and is the basis of Pin Point Direct Marketing.

Interruptive Marketing, Bock explains, is when you are sitting at a table and start eating some pretzels. Just when you would be ready to order a drink, you notice that table tent which says, "Get the feeling. Toyota." Great ad campaign, but at the wrong time.
"Pinpoint Direct Marketing™", on the other hand, promotes a company and its services at the exact moment that the person is ready to buy-offering what the customer wants, when the customer wants it.

According to Bock, "The foundation of our campaigns is to begin with determining "DEMAND" and "LEVEL OF COMPETITION" relating to our client's specific product or services and then to establish whether a viable community of potential customers exists."
With modern technology, New Identities is able to quickly determine what is hot and what is not.

"With sophisticated Internet database queries" Bock says, "we can advise our clients what people are looking for in search engines, level of competition online and provide an educated assessment of offline interest, determine achievable levels of traffic to newly developed web sites and even probable response to television commercials. Then we develop a ROI analysis prior to developing expensive web sites or other marketing initiatives."

Additionally, New Identities can determine which Hollywood Stars, vacation location, new fad or new slang term companies or politicians should tie their products or campaigns to for the best response.

Once it's clear what potential customers are looking for online, New Identities positions the product or service so that it is accessible to them.

Unlike traditional Internet developers that may build a million dollar web site for a company that has 10,000 products - the New Identities Agency has taken a different approach.
New Identities might determine that of the 10,000 products being sold by their client, only 2000 have enough online traffic to achieve a positive return on investment.

"In this case", Bock says, "we might develop 2000 small web sites at $5000 each instead of one web site offering 10,000 products that might cost $1,000,000."

Bock explains that people don't search online like they shop at the mall. As the Internet has grown, 'surfers' are learning that they need to be very specific in their searching efforts.

"If someone is looking to purchase 'ladies golf shoes' and search for only 'shoes', they will find 5 million web pages listed, quickly get frustrated and overwhelmed by the amount of garbage. The experienced and savvy 'surfer' is now searching for "ladies golf shoes" and finding exactly what they wanted."

Some products and services have so much related search engine traffic that they warrant the development of numerous related web sites-providing third party endorsements and positioning the client as the "expert". Something to remember is that what is often the MOST important thing a brand can accomplish on the Internet is to establish credibility. No Credibility = No Sale. Without the use of multiple Internet channels and utilizing offline channels it is often impossible to establish enough credibility to close the sale.

EXAMPLE: A hypothetical chocolate manufacturer produces chocolate chips and promotes them on a website under the company name Mighty Sweet Inc.

Using Pin Point Direct Marketing methods, New Identities may find that the community of users of those chocolate chips is not looking up "mighty sweet" as a search term.
One component of "Pinpoint Direct Marketing™" is to create a series of web sites to appeal to each user community (which can then drive traffic to www.mighty-sweet-inc.com through content, testimonials, endorsements and links).

Recent queries to databases have startling revelations.
Did you know that currently, more than 35,000 people per day are searching for "baby names", as opposed to 12 months ago only 2000 people per day were searching for the same term?
What is more startling is that there are only 57 web sites listed in Yahoo that come up for the term "baby names".
What is more interesting is that there are approximately 2000 people per day searching for "baby boy names" and another 2000 searching for "baby boy names" and there are NO sites indexed by Yahoo for either of these terms [Yahoo accounts for approximately 40% of all Internet search engine traffic-when Google logo appears on Yahoo search results page; it indicates that no sites for search term are indexed in Yahoo]. The implications of all this are astounding.

Just think of the Marketing, branding and manufacturing data suddenly available for clothing manufacturers.

Until recently expensive focus groups and consulting companies over a three to six month period were necessary to achieve what can be accomplished in a few hours with today's technologies.

What they are doing, is taking the public's temperature. If you know what to target and how to target you can invest a fraction of your previous marketing dollars and experience one of those rare Guerilla Marketing opportunities.

Throw in user group postings, online press releases, email recipe club, recipe screen savers and a direct mail campaign to targeted visitors and you've hit a home run; viral marketing at it's best-marketing direct to your customers.

"Pinpoint Direct Marketing™" aims to encourage potential customers to use the Internet in the way it's most effective: as a dynamic and vast information resource. By working with search engines, community building, and viral marketing, New Identities' "Pinpoint Direct Marketing™" delivers Web surfers the client's pitch after they have done some research and are ready to make a purchase.

Big Results for Drug Maker
One of Bock's partners, Jeff Greenfield, explains how this approach made a huge difference in pharmaceutical giant Forest Laboratories' marketing of Celexa, a prescription anti-depressant whose sales had plateaued at $800 million.

"It's like Forest had been assuming that people would see their ads and say to themselves 'I'm depressed, I should be using this drug' and then go online to www.celexa.com. But that's not normally how the Internet works."

Greenfield states, "The real power of the Internet is in people actually looking for information. You can look at the numbers and see that a lot more people are going online to learn about depression than any specific treatments."

New Identities developed a strategy for Forest that targeted people who were already searching for more information about depression, rather than the excessively broad (and expensive) TV-viewing and Web-surfing audiences they had courted previously. Bock started with a rigorous evaluation the depression community including a focus group-arranged through a third party-which demonstrated that 45% of new depression medication patients research online prior to getting a prescription.

Focusing on that group of Web researchers, determined the terms searched most often and drove traffic to the website through such terms as teen depression, clinical depression, medical side effects, etc. The strategy included creating sites, like www.healingdepression.com , to encourage readers to learn more about depression, with links to the product site where appropriate. The Celexa site was constructed to dynamically generate content tailored to the referring site.

"In the end," says Greenfield, "this approach ends up getting people to www.celexa.com only when they are ready for that. Sure, you could have a pop-up ad connecting to the site for people that search for information about depression, but it wouldn't be as effective. That person isn't interested in learning about products yet-they want to research the condition first. Our approach encourages them to do that."
To add value to the Celexa site, New Identities developed tools for patients. A prescription reminder reminds individuals when they should take their medicine. The "Action Tracker" encourages people to track activities that increase the likelihood of successful treatment success, like exercising regularly and eating well-balanced meals.

The results for Forest were dramatic!

The average number of monthly visitors climbed from around 21,000 to over 600,000, drug sales increased 20% over the following 12 months, even while Forest Laboratories' average monthly investment into promotion dipped to just 10% of what it had been previously. "At the same time," says Greenfield, "Celexa became the hot new drug. The online marketing had a lot to do with that."

In a letter to Bock, Forest Laboratories Senior Product Manager Matthew Warburton says the work "enabled Forest to surge ahead in its utilization of the Internet for e-business solutions and make dramatic strides in its direct to consumer online marketing program."

At Risk Online Every Day: Brands
As more and more people use the Internet in the purchase process, an unsophisticated approach to the Web could start costing businesses a lot more than missed opportunities. A cruise line once approached New Identities eager to improve their online presence. Even though the company was regularly flooded with letters, cards, and e-mails from very satisfied customers, New Identities found that for some reason when the company came up on popular online message boards about travel, most of the postings were negative. New Identities' research also found that online cruise shoppers often visited these message boards before making a purchase decision.

New Identities' approach began with an enormous effort to "clean up" the company's online reputation. The campaign was based on finding ways to inspire people to put positive messages on those message boards. It was a step that could have been avoided though-if the cruise line had focused on its online image sooner.

Information tends to spread like wildfire online, which is why Bock feels it is essential for companies to have a stake in what people are saying about them. The right pinpoint direct marketing plan can be a very effective way to do that-not only can it protect a valued reputation, but it can also help to generate significant new business.

Knowing exactly what people are looking for online empowers New Identities to make smart use of all sorts of marketing tools. Bock says the agency's grasp of existing Internet activity also lets New Identities give potential clients remarkably accurate assessments of their likely return on investment at the outset of Web marketing projects.

The New Identities team pools a wide range of expertise into intelligent, integrated programs. Their bag of tricks includes behavioral advertising, Network & Cable TV advertising, direct mail, print ads, newsgroup postings, email newsletters, e-press releases, dynamic content, online infomercials, pop-under ads, interactive screensavers, downloadable tools, and more.

For KO Electric Fiber & Data, for instance, they put together an authoritative guide on the type of services KO provides. Then, using a variety of media-including broadcast fax, direct mail, public relations, email, websites, user groups, and chat rooms-they saturated the market, positioning KO as an expert in the field.

Often, it makes sense to involve celebrities in promoting products. For example, with the proper set-up, a few well-placed phone calls could get some top TV, movie, and music stars on the guest list at a client's product launch party.

Photos and video of the celebrities enjoying the products (shot by professionals at the party) can spruce up the client website, while ushering in all sorts of free publicity. In addition to standard news coverage, an executive or two might win a spot as a guest on a radio talk show to tell a funny celebrity anecdote from the party. Even better, that same high-quality video of stars at the launch party could end up on a prime-time TV show like Entertainment Tonight-generating the kind of excitement money just can't buy.

Just as TV can affect Internet marketing, the Internet is permanently changing older media like TV, too. Greenfield cites a statistic that this year 20-25% of those responding to TV ads featuring a toll-free phone number checked for the product online before picking up the phone. "We expect that number to rise to fifty percent by 2007," says Greenfield. "People are convinced there's magic in there. They think the Internet holds some secret they can find, like discounts." This means companies advertising on television will risk losing half of their new customers to Internet-savvy competitors if they don't have strong control of their online image.

Bock points out that used properly, the Internet can even play a huge role in market research, giving companies the equivalent of massive, instant focus groups. Testing the appeal of different marketing messages used to require months of expensive research. "Now you can put the different test messages side by side on the Internet, and track instantaneous results," he explains.

Bock believes that the more executives at client firms understand about Internet culture, the more likely they are to make successful decisions, so he encourages them to get training, and to use the Internet extensively for things like banking, email, personal sites, research, shopping and more. "We are not examining a mature business model," he says, "so the people with a feel for the culture have a major advantage. The best way to get that is to immerse the decision-makers in the culture."

Creating New Identities: Consultant Jim Bock
Internet traffic, marketing, and branding consultant Jim Bock leads pinpoint direct marketing, customer relationship management (CRM) and direct-to-consumer (DTC) programs that achieve remarkable results for an array of top firms like Hershey Foods, Forest Laboratories, and Samsung Electronics.

He came to New Identities after 13 years on Wall Street and five years running The WIT Agency. The techniques he develops benefit from his mastery of business intricacies such as process analysis and return-on-investment (ROI). He has been involved in over $100 million worth of financings during his years at investment banking consultant HDV Holdings International.

At the WIT Agency, Bock headed the company's relationship with Hershey Foods. Among his many successes with Hershey was the analysis of all Hershey Chocolate sites, addressing usability, site organization, and search engine rankings. He also handled Hershey's launch of the first Hershey product that also had an Internet launch-Jolly Rancher Fruit Chews.

In addition to Bock's experience, New Identities clients also benefit from his obvious zeal. Richard Vezzosi, president of HDV Holdings International says that Bock possesses "the finesse of a prima ballerina, the strategy of Alexander the Great, the political savvy of President Clinton, the kindness of Mother Theresa and the tenacity of a pit bull." Dick Anderson, former creative director/group manager at McCann-Erickson (who handled the Coke campaign) says: "In a time that seems to serve up a lot of soft drinks without fizz, Jim Bock is the real thing."

In a letter to Bock; Tom Bugg, Hershey Foods, Marketing manager writes "WIT can effectively identify a target audience and deliver on the target's expectation. " "…was very committed to this process, as they have been with all of our Hershey's projects, well beyond just performing the work they were asked or paid to do." "...has proven to be an effective Internet partner and the company consistently delivers quality products and innovative content."

In another letter to Bock while running WIT; Matthew Warburton, Senior Product Manager of Forest Laboratories, says "...contributions have greatly enhanced Forest's ability to use the Internet for more sophisticated marketing and corporate communications, as well as dramatically improved efficiency of the company's internal operations."

In a reference letter from his former business partner, Margaret Irish, after six months of running The WIT Agency says: "Beyond the considerable financial improvements, Mr. Bock's contributions include revamping the corporate structure, adopting a new accounting system, hiring and training our staff, adding transparency to client billing and fees, and in general organizing and scripting our business process."