The Big Disconnect

If you are going to market your site in any way (even a little URL at the bottom of your traditional print ad), then your marketing department should live, eat and breathe your website until they understand it better than anyone does.”

This is what happens when your marketing team is unplugged.

This morning, while reading The Industry Standard, I came across a great print ad for a new AltaVista search feature. You may have already seen the ad I am referring to—it is the one with the cute kid twirling around the room and the father playing piano in the background. The copy reads, “How can I tell if my child is gifted? Search AltaVista. Are triple-turn fouettes considered neoclassical exaggeration? Search AltaVista.”

I gather from this ad that AltaVista is introducing Natural Language Query on their site. This technology is growing in popularity throughout the web, thanks in part to the phenomenal success of the search engine Ask Jeeves (ask.com) which returns relevant results when you type in normal, conversational questions.

According to this ad, I can now ask AltaVista a question like “How can I tell if my child is gifted?” and it will return relevant results. Being a huge fan of Ask Jeeves, I am intrigued that one of the leading portals is offering this technology. I am actually intrigued enough that before I turn another page, I jump online to try it.

Pause to reflect on this for a moment. The ad, by virtue of running in The Industry Standard, is targeted to Internet decision makers. Because I am an Internet decision maker, we can then infer that the ad worked. The ad was effective enough to make me stop, read the copy and immediately act upon it.

So, anyway, there I am on AltaVista. I type in:

“How can I tell if my child is gifted?”

The engine results say:

“AltaVista knows the answers to these questions:
Where can I find toy recommendations for children aged 0-12 months?
Where can I find gift ideas and suggestions for kids?”

Huh. That’s not what I asked AltaVista. But, since I am already there, I figure I might as well find out what their toy recommendations are for children aged 0-12 months. I think that by clicking on this link I will see a list of stores that sell educational toys for gifted children. But no, indeed. The link sends me straight to the Toys ‘R Us home page. This link was paid advertising space for Toys ‘R Us!

I can’t believe that AltaVista tricked me into clicking on an ad when I was just innocently trying to ascertain whether or not my child is gifted. Does someone over there at AltaVista or Toys ‘R Us really think if I am trying to find out whether or not my child is gifted that I will stop to buy him a present along the way? Ugh. I am sure someone in the marketing department at AltaVista thought up this ploy — offer a Natural Language Query and then sell advertising space in the results. That’s fine. It might even be a great idea. But tell me it’s an ad before I click. And even better, make sure the ad is relevant to what I am looking for.

My rant does not end here

By now I have started to really wonder if my child is in fact gifted. So I jump over to Ask Jeeves to see if they have the answer to my question. Guess what. They did. They also had a couple of links to stores, but these are in a separate section and above them reads the line, “The following questions will take you directly to an online store.”

AltaVista has forever lost a customer (a customer with a big mouth, I might add), by failing to connect with me and understand what I expect. Meanwhile, by fulfilling my expectations, Ask Jeeves has made me an even bigger fan of their site. Ask Jeeves understands their product and understands their audience. AltaVista has experienced the Big Disconnect.

The Big Disconnect occurs when marketing departments:

a. Do not understand the site they are marketing or,

b. Do not understand the people who use their site.

If your marketing team is not working hand in hand with your web team, then somewhere, somehow, you will experience the Big Disconnect. You will market a web application that is not quite working properly. You will have a valuable web application that is not marketed at all. You will dash the hopes of your users by raising them up high and then not fulfilling them.

If you are going to market your site in any way (even a little URL at the bottom of your traditional print ad), then your marketing department should live, eat and breathe your website until they understand it better than anyone does.

By the way—I am sure that Toys ‘R Us paid a pretty penny to be the first in the search results on AltaVista. But they blew it by treating me like any other site visitor by dumping me on their home page when I clicked through to their site. They could have salvaged the interaction with me if they had instead sent me to a short, little selling path that acknowledged where I came from and mentioned all the great, educational toys they had for my gifted child. But, then that is the subject of another article. Check out, The Path to Personal Selling for more.