Heather Luttrell: Revolutionizing Online Advertising

Sunny Gault: Hi! Welcome to Dog and Pony, I'm Sunny Gault. They're empowering Internet advertisers one click at a time. IndieClick, a division of 3Jane delivers advertising and branding campaigns to more than 200 important online destinations for music, film/entertainment, culture and community. Heather Luttrell is the president of IndieClick. How is IndieClick different from traditional advertising companies?

Heather Luttrell: So we actually serve traditional advertising companies. We run a vertical ad network, which means that we specialize in vertical industries and in our case we are focusing on music, film, culture and communities. We work with sites like Pandora, iLike, Last.fm, Hype Machine, lots of really cool indie blogs. We serve all the advertising on our sites. So we're not going to any outside services for that. We're a third party that can tell you whether that site is as popular as it was three months ago.

Sunny Gault: Yeah,

Heather Luttrell: Or whether it's on the wane and what's new and exciting that's like that property. Rich media campaigns need to be tested. And it needs to be tested by someone who knows how they should function. A three-day delay for a campaign can cause an ad agency hundreds of thousands of dollars. And they'll never get that money back because it's time sensitive.

Sunny Gault: How does IndieClick empower Internet advertisers?

Heather Luttrell: We're seeing an interesting trend in the online advertising world. There used to be a time when you could buy a MySpace for 5 cents CPMs and we charge $6 to $12 CPMs for the sites that we work.

Sunny Gault: Right.

Heather Luttrell: So there's still are a lot of competitors in that one dollar range and you can buy across 300 sites for a dollar and a lot of advertisers have relied on that, just getting their message out as cheaply as possible. As there's more competition for that dollar space, the prices are starting to go up and it's no longer cost effective to just scatter your message across the Internet.

Sunny Gault: Are you finding that more and more larger companies are getting involved in the online space and they're taking more of a chance in this type of campaigns. Are they still a little hesitant?

Heather Luttrell: Sometimes, large brands are too aggressive. They move everything in their budget to something that's brand new. We always try to suggest that you put 20% of your budget in experimental media.

Sunny Gault: Are you also saying that more niche companies, smaller companies, more focused companies that are looking for very specific demographics? Do you find them really embracing the Internet since, you know there's whole Websites that could be devoted to one particular topic.

Heather Luttrell: Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a great advantage in the online world, which is that you can really do intense micro marketing. You can take a thousand dollars and put it in seven different places and really compare the results and in many cases you get apples and apples, comparison.

Sunny Gault: How much money can websites make through working with you guys?

Heather Luttrell: This is the golden question that everyone always asks and it definitely depends on the amount of traffic that your website has. We get a lot of people who are really excited about getting 2,000 infractions a day. That's 2,000 reloads of the Website every day and that actually translates to two sellable ad units for that day 'cause it's sold in thousands. We see sites that make a couple thousand dollars every pay period with us and we've had sites that make well in the six figures working with us.

Sunny Gault: So how do brands insure that their content isn't being placed next to inappropriate content?

Heather Luttrell: You know this happens quite often and this is a challenge with purer contextual based advertising where you were just looking for words. I think that many companies are getting better at solving that. We have this publisher endorsement element within IndieClick because not only our publishers are very happy to be making money working with us, but they'd like the advertisings they see on the properties. They also have to approve every ad that goes on their site.

Sunny Gault: How did you end up where you are today, you know, president of this company. You seem to be really passionate about it. So what was the step or the multiple steps that took to get to where you are?

Heather Luttrell: I think that my passion around IndieClick comes from having been a heavy online user and being really frustrated with the blaring ads and the sounds that goes off when you're on a site and the inappropriateness of what I was seeing and vibrating inattention and seeing publishers go out of business. Seeing people have to shut down really great websites because they weren't in the ad sales business. And they didn't have the right relationships and so you know when I can find a website that I think is really doing fantastic things and help them to make money and go out on their own. I mean, that's just the most fulfilling thing in the world and obviously for advertisers, even -- we get t-shirt companies that are mum and pop and they do a thousand dollar campaign and they start making enough money to open a store. And that's really exciting, so it's really the best feel-good job I've ever had in terms of what we do and how we impact our community.

Sunny Gault: Heather Luttrell, thank you for joining us today. It was a pleasure speaking with you. And as always, if you have questions, comments, or ideas for guests, please e-mail info@dogandpony.com. I'm Sunny Gault, thanks for watching.