JayWeintraub.com - Internet Advertising Analysis and Growth Insights

LowerMyBills - Auto Insurance Ads

Those that have followed the online performance-marketing space will know well the name LowerMyBills. Through a combination of market forces and sheer determination they became one of the web's most savviest, pervasive display advertisers and the company to which all others were compared (certainly in the mortgage lead generation space). With the mortgage market in the crappers, LowerMyBills can no longer earn the upwards of $20 million monthly they did in their prime. For them, as it has with everyone else who relied almost exclusively on mortgage, the time has come to diversify. In LowerMyBills' case, it seems that auto insurance is one such new vertical they are testing.

Display is tough. If you look across the lead gen landscape, very few verticals have scaled on display - education and mortgage being the most prominent.  Auto insurance is huge on television, so it would seem that it has the right profile for web - everyone who has a car needs it, and consumers are often price sensitive not brand sensitive. Let's look at what we can gleam from LowerMyBills' execution.

The Ad:

It's a pretty typical ad; the ships move around. It's not a typical LMB ad though in the sense that it includes form field questions as part of the design and is not dominated by dancing whatevers.

Landing page:

This is a definite departure from the mortgage landing pages. The font is the same and the call to action arrow / font has been used on some of their (Experian Interactive's) ClassesUSA banners. It's the first landing page of theirs that I've seen that is a truly short form, though, and the graphical car makes it slightly more whimsical. Again though, the company has decided to use (as was the case on the banner) similar language in the call to action, get a new payment in this case. With mortgage, the call to action was calculate new rate. It worked well, but a case could be made that users filling out the form expected to see what their new rate is not be pitched a rate that fit the needs of the lead buyers. By saying "get new payment" they avoid some of the potential semantic quibbling from the mortgage banner language. Continuing on...

After you enter your zip is where it gets interesting -

Unlike mortgage, LowerMyBills is more or less acting like an affiliate. They aren't hosting the page, which also means that leads aren't being sold to their own network. In this case, Insweb is technically collecting the leads and selling it to their buyer network. Auto insurance has the potential to act like mortgage; as mentioned before users are generally price sensitive, so that paves the way for the lead generator to assign the lead to its clients as opposed to education where the lead generator can steer the user to a certain school but the school's branding plays a dominant role.

Now, the step two to Insweb isn't the only interesting thing. I clicked on the banner from a different machine on a different day, filled out my zip, and was taken here.

It's a completely different lander; not only that, it's powered by a different company. Instead of Insweb, this page is run by Insurance.com using the domain ComparisonMarket.com.

Overall, this experience had three surprises -
1) Seeing LowerMyBills doing Auto Insurance
2) Seeing LowerMyBills use a third-party for lead liquidity
3) Seeing LowerMyBills test between multiple external parties

It's hard to say whether LowerMyBills is doing this just to understand the metrics or as a backfill until they build their own network. Auto insurance is one of the growing verticals, though, so while the implementation is a surprise, their choice of verticals isn't, although compared to education and mortgage, auto insurance is a much longer form and pays much less per lead. 

In case you are curious, here is an Insweb banner when they are advertising directly and the landing page. There are certainly some similarities.

Post Script - notice the exit pop from Insweb - not trying to get the user back but sending to their competitors.

Miscellaneous Thoughts

My posts tend to focus only the industry and not me personally. This post starts to blur the lines.

• LinkedIn - Beth Kirsch sees it a 2.0 version of HotJobs.com? From what I understand the monetization strategies overlap. Both sites revenues come from companies looking for employees plus on site ad revenue, and their users are those in the job market. There are some subtle differences on the "advertiser" front, but the biggest difference are the users. Instead of capturing just those in transition, LinkedIn captures the lifecyle of business behavior - where the majority of the activity comes from activities outside of looking for a job; if anything, it's pre-HotJobs. The activities are really about improving one's current standing so that when the time comes for a job, they won't have to work as hard to find one, and it will be better than had they not been active on the site.
• Short-term versus long-term thinking - I've long held an as of yet to be substantiated view on humanity, a slightly pessimistic take on the capitalism. I'm what I call under-educated below as I haven't read much on economics, and what I have read I'm bound to summarize incorrectly (Penn forgive me); I can only point out what I observe. In my opinion, human beings are both irrational and short-sighted. We are short-sighted for much the same cold medicine sells well. It's easier to treat the symptoms that appear than try and ward off something you can't feel this second. Our economic system works the same way and that has impacted everything, including our environmental planning. Take saving money. There is no fun, no gratification in saving, and that is because it's purely rational.  We can't feel the benefit of it as we do; it's not emotional, which is the nature of short-term behavior. If the average person could feel the pain now of that future moment when they wished they'd saved, or planned, etc., then they might do so early and with the consistency needed. We as people tend not to do something until it might be too late; so far we've been lucky in that it hasn't been too late, but that may not continue to be the case.
• DMConfidential.com - I've written quite a bit about the economy (as an under-educated observer). I'm starting to piece together one of the articles for this Thursday's edition. I'm trying to synthesize something from the layoffs at Yahoo, the innumerous articles starting to chronicle the credit implosion, the belief by some that the online ad market is recession proof, to the damagingly high value given to Slide.com - having it within a hair of MySpace's sale price while we're beginning a recession sends the wrong message in my opinion.
• 475 Kent in Williamsburg (Brooklyn)- one of my favorite places to visit and home to my best friend and the publisher of DMConfidential. I'm saddened to see everyone summarily booted on one of the worst days of the year. The building is unconventional, almost a dorm its closeness and eclectic mix of occupants. It is truly one of the most unique and inspiring places to spend time. I hope they can be back in soon, especially as it's my home away from home. Two other articles - here and here
• Andrew Chen - I read a blurb about Slide founder Max Levchin and his lack of sleep. It reminds me of Andrew. His writings are brilliant, and his ability to make posts look good too will make any blogger envious. He's one of the best minds out there.

Selling Source Acquired

Those in the short-term loan lead space had heard the rumors for a little while, but today the announcement made it official. London Bay Capital (out of San Francisco) "announced today that a newly-formed affiliate of LBC has acquired Selling Source." "Plainfield Asset Management LLC ("Plainfield"). A fund managed by Plainfield provided a significant portion of the first and second-lien indebtedness in the transaction as well as making a significant equity investment alongside London Bay." (see release here).

In a rather surprising move of transparency the release both hinted at the purchase price but more enlightening the companies revenues and profit. For those wondering at the profitability of marketing service companies in the subprime financial space, Selling Source "revenues in 2007 exceeded $125 million with pre-tax income of approximately $21 million, representing an organic growth rate of more than 50% compared to 2006."

There are some well run companies in this space, which people might not assume given the audiences they serves and penchant for Florida and Las Vegas locations. One of my favorites has only been Swish Marketing. As for Selling Source, I remember seeing their amazing booth at the SF DMA show and being surprised. This was 2006, and up until then, I had assumed that those in that space were small shops not business builders, the exact opposite of the image that Selling Source presented given some of the talent they hired from within the industry and the unexpectedly robust product offering.

That said, there are some natural risks, which makes me think it was a smart move by the Selling Source folks. Payday loans aren't going anywhere, but there has been severe margin compression over time for the lead buyers and outside the lead practices that they rely on for their own margin. The FTC will most likely start to put some pressure on the tactics (Mark Meckler will have more on the FTC investigations in next week's DMConfidential.com) and they (not Selling Source per say) have a less diversified traffic mix than some other verticals. Again, feels like a good time to take on a larger partner with deeper pockets, much like AzoogleAds did in 2004.