Full Circle

Brandweek, Sept 4, 2000 by Erik Gruenwedel

Circle.com's Charlie Tarzian believes that successful Web marketing lies in the total sum of its parts.

At a time when well-established national and international brands have realized that new media platforms are increasingly important to the execution of successful integrated marketing campaigns, it's become clear that some of the tenets of traditional marketing and advertising have necessarily changed, according to Charlie Tarzian, chief strategy officer at Baltimore-based Circle.com.

"You have to tie together so many different aspects of a business in real time, it presents challenges that were never there before," he says. For the 5-year-old Circle.com--whose client roster includes Guinness, UPS and IBM--those challenges require a strategic approach to online marketing that not only includes banner and Web site creation, but also historical data-mining and a clear-headed look at the market. "You cannot optimize or orchestrate a Web-based business unless you know everyday how it has been acting," says Tarzian.

While Tarzian doesn't think the days of the ubiquitous banner ad will soon be over, he does believe that most practitioners of this advertising platform, which accounts for more than 95 percent of all online ad spending, aren't maximizing the banner ad's potential. "A lot of [online ad networks such as] the DoubleClicks, 24/7s [and others] fail to recognize that there is more cause and effect than whether or not they are getting traffic to [a client's] site," he says. Indeed, Tarzian believes that there's a disconnect between Web site traffic and the online ad efforts leading to that traffic: "We feel there is an incredible discontinuity between e-mail marketing companies, banner advertising companies and demand-generation companies, and the actual operation of the Web site itself."

Tarzian underscores the critical issue of customer conversion with the example of a current client that he says attracts 20,000 potential customers a week to its site looking to subscribe to an expensive service. But in reality, the company manages to enroll about 350 people a week.

"Is it the service itself or is it the navigation of the site and the way this company is asking for information from potential customers that is causing the falloff?" asks Tarzian. "You have to separate the issues and come up with a plan to test which ones are the problems. It could be all of them."

For Guinness, Circle.com created "The G Spot," a weekly e-mail that is delivered each Friday to customers based on their postal codes. Opened as a file, the e-mail advertising expands to list relevant weekend social activities in the subscriber's area, including movie, CD, book, food and wine reviews.

"This is more than simply a way to put Guinness on a PC, PDA or cell phone," says Tarzian. "It is expanding the brand to allow people to rely on Guinness for information that affects their lives."

Tarzian believes that advertising on the Web is quickly being surpassed by so-called "collaborative commerce," which calls upon the ability to mesh content, products, services, and timing, and move all of those components across a continuum.

"[Web-based marketing] is not [about] demand generation and traffic building," says Tarzian. "It's not just advertising and banners. It's not just registration vehicles, It's not just [closing] a sale. It's a complete end-to-end realization that you can have a point of failure anywhere along the way and you'll miss opportunities."