Zillow, the real estate wunderkind, announced a partnership with Yahoo! in which Zillow’s Zestimates (home value estimates) will show up in Yahoo! search results (as a Shortcut). Here’s the result for ‘home values’ on Yahoo!. Zillow will also be featured in Yahoo’s real estate section (under the ‘what’s my home worth‘ link).
This is obviously a major coup for Zillow and continues a trend of innovative start-ups partnering with the big search engines to get to the next level.
While services like Zillow, Farecast, ShopWiki, Kaboodle, Mpire, etc. might offer a lot of value to consumers and might even have solid business plans, there’s still a big problem in reaching consumers. Google and Yahoo! have become THE starting points for most internet users. New companies can launch and make a splash with cool new technology or incredible consumer benefits, but PR or buzz can only go so far. The companies have to do SEO and PPC marketing…but PPC gets very expensive very quickly.
So then there’s ‘business development’ or ‘partnership marketing’. What Zillow is doing with Yahoo!. Y! gets great ‘content’ and Zillow gets incredible exposure. This is similar to Kaboodle and Mpire teaming up with eBay.
I know that biz dev deals have always been around (and I was doing internet biz dev back in ‘95), but it seems more important than ever for young companies b/c of high barriers to entry like having to spend $5m on PPC marketing.
It’s almost a textbook formula for success these days…build a whiz-bang new thing, something that Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, or Google could do, but wouldn’t because it’s not their core competency. Launch with a big PR blitz. Prove that the technology works. Then go talk to Yahoo! or Google about a partnership.
The only real exceptions to this rule (that a friend pointed out to me) are YouTube and MySpace.
Definitely check out Paul English’s (Paul is co-founder and CTO) post on some of his favorite email comments on the ad campaign (warning: rating is NC-17).
Steve Hafner’s video (found through Mike Fridgen’s Travel Start-Ups) about a trip to Dallas to ‘meet Kayak’s biggest fans’ cracks me up:
And you’ve gotta love this one calling the ad campaign a way to ‘bypass the laws and limits that restrain political action committees:
Can Qixo really claim to be ‘new’ as it does in this Adwords ad which showed up next to my Mobi Newsletter in Gmail (my newsletter email). Hasn’t the company been around since 2000?
Better question…when did Qixo start (or re-start) advertising? Are they aiming for a comeback?
This is my reaction to Kayak’s $10m advertising campaign…
The online travel industry is really crowded. People already search a number of sites before making a purchase online. Everyone stops at Expedia, Orbitz, or Travelocity. A lot of people check out Southwest or Delta directly. Most people do not know about the travel search engines. More and more people are booking directly. With this type of environment, it’s really hard to cut through the noise
Kayak currently does a ton of search marketing and has some quality business development relationships (Pinpoint Travel on AOL is powered by Kayak, although AOL Travel is not). The company builds great tools and has incredibly friendly Web 2.0 type usability. The search results are fairly comprehensive (there’s always more work to do). The company gets mentioned in the press a ton as a top site. But with all of these things going for it, the company has only brought in an additional 200K visitors (aprx) each month since December of ‘05 (according to comScore data). Which means that the company can continue its slow but steady climb, paying more and more for travel related keywords on the search engines, or it can try something new…like a TV campaign..
This is a bold move by Kayak. The travel search engines are stuck in anonymity and no one outside the industry really understands the benefits of using them. With this TV campaign, Kayak can at least get its name out there just as Expedia or Travelocity would (although not on the same scale). The company can look bigger than it is. The company can possibly get more people to check out Kayak.com. And the idea of making the TV commercials web-like and therefore web-ready is really smart. Some of the TV spots will ‘go viral’ and be all over the place in a matter of days…which means more press for the company and more visitors to the site.
Also, I like the user generated TV ad promotion and the execution is clean and simple, although without a voiceover option the ads are REALLY dry [Kayak needs to immediately allow people to insert a voice-track or at least some type of background music].
Finally, as mentioned in the Q&A, the TV campaign will improve click-through rate (CTR) on Kayak’s pay per click (PPC) ads, driving down the company’s click fees (although overall marketing spend should rise with the increased traffic).
In other words, there are a lot of positive things about this campaign if the goal is to get the word out about the company.
Unfortunately, though, I don’t think that’s good enough. I’m looking for more than just a traffic hit. I’m looking for loyal visitors who turn into loyal customers. And if you look carefully at the commercials, you’ll notice that most of them don’t really have a strong call to action. Many just say “There are a million reasons to travel. There’s one site to search before you go. Kayak.com. Life’s a trip.” That’s not enough to drive people away from Expedia and to Kayak…or away from Google and to Kayak. Some commercials say “More options. More savings. More results.” Now that’s a little better. It gives me a reason to visit the site. But those lines are attached to funny commercials…I’m afraid that the quirky, irreverent content will be first in people’s minds and ‘Kayak.com’ will be 5th.
[Kayak, please pay attention…] Also, when people get to the site, I think they’ll be completely let down. Besides 2 small links on the right hand side of the page, nothing really changed. Kayak’s interface is too ordinary. The creatives the Brooklyn Brothers did for Kayak look like they belong on FareCast (with it’s bright, welcoming colors), not Kayak. It’s a fun, creative campaign…some of that style needs to flow back to Kayak.com. The site needs to be more integrated with the campaign.
Also, the tagline ‘Life’s a Trip’ is in tiny text on the right hand side of the page, while ‘Search with us, book with them’ is still very prominent. I’ve always thought that ‘book with them’ is a very dangerous motto as the uninitiated might just open up a second browser and go directly to AA.com to book.
In the end, I love the idea of the campaign because the travel search engines need to try something different or they’ll live in obscurity forever. I hate the idea because Kayak is not going to get $10m worth of revenue from the campaign anytime soon.
So does this campaign signify a web 2.0 bubble or is this a brilliant move by Kayak? No bubble here, just a small company taking a BIG risk. Which is a good thing. Will this turn Kayak into a household name? I doubt it, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Kayak today launched a 10 million dollar, yes, 10 million dollar TV advertising campaign which includes TV commercials. And it’s not just any advertising campaign…it has the potential to be the talk of the water cooler, go crazy on YouTube, and be on a ton of MySpace pages.
Following is my interview with Kellie Pelletier, VP of Communications for Kayak, Dean Harris, CMO of Kayak, and Guy Barnett, co-founder of the Brooklyn Brothers Ad Agency, the firm which created the ads. I’ll add my comments in a different post.
Check out how Kayak is presenting the ads on its site. Kayak is running a promotion where users can create their own Kayak ad through a set of very easy tools and email the ads to friends. The producer of the best user generated ad will be flown to NYC to see his ad made and then Kayak will air the commercial on TV. At last count there were about 12 user generated Kayak ads posted on YouTube (a couple are from Kayak employees).
Why did you make the move to Kayak (from Vonage) and what have you been up to since you arrived?
Dean: I moved to Kayak because it represents a terrific brand that will only get stronger. I love the idea, the people, and the VC support. There’s the potential to do good for consumers and for Kayak employees and investors. What I’ve been doing is trying to develop a creative strategy and plan for the brand. I’ve been here for less than 4 months. We’ve made some changes to our site. We started to build the community and now have a better handle of the unique identity of the brand. I’m responsible for all marketing which is a combination of branding and direct marketing. It’ll be much easier for Kayak to gain traffic to the site if there is awareness of the brand.
My background is in online direct marketing which means that I don’t always understand branding. I still don’t understand the value of a 30 second TV spot for a car company on a popular Thursday night show because you can’t clearly measure the results… Dean: My background is in both branding and direct marketing. All communication with consumers is a combination branding and direct marketing. What you see here is not formulated with respect to one or the other. We’ve come up with 13 unique TV spots. It’s interesting creative, but we’re buying ads on direct marketing basis – which means that we get much lower rates and the stations have some flexibility as to when to place ads on air. One of the basics of direct marketing is that cost really matters. Guy Barnett of the Brooklyn Brothers Ad Agency has a background in both branding and direct marketing as well. Making the distinction is not useful as the campaign has to be done in a consistent measurable way.
Guy: We’re both very aware that this advertising has to drive results in terms of getting people to Kayak and using the site, as opposed to being about the long term brand. We’re trying to create a compelling image and a distinctive way of showing our brand which will show in the results. We want consumers to know the name Kayak.com, that there are more options and choices, and that Kayak has a greater offering in terms of travel results.
Dean: We also have far fewer resources so we know this campaign has to work that much harder than others. We don’t have the budget. The creative has to be more distinctive so the ads can be shorter. We produced these spots incredibly efficiently. We have to make ourselves look bigger and stand out with fewer resources. The role [of the campaign] isn’t to educate consumers on how Kayak or Expedia makes money, the role is to get across a consumer friendly message. Whether this is a travel search engine or travel agent is immaterial right now. The goal is to get people to enjoy the service and know Kayak is a better choice.
Why did you decide to commit to TV advertising? Kellie: We’re all [the travel search engines] lagging behind the online travel agents (OTAs). How do we compete? We hired a CMO, and let him decide. It wasn’t that we wanted TV, it was that we wanted to be a household name.
How is this campaign similar or different than the campaigns you ran at Vonage? Dean: It’s similar in several respects. It’s distinctive. There are multiple executions that suggest people will be interested in watching the commercial again or watching the next one to find out what’s new or what’s next. It’s also produced cheaply. We spent money on media vs. production. The difference is that Vonage had a bigger budget.
Who is the campaign targeting? Dean: Adults 25-54 who are self directed travelers. $60K+ in household income.
What is the goal in launching this TV campaign? Dean: The goal is to raise awareness of the site. Propel the site to more traffic, awareness, and clicks and push Kayak towards greater heights.
How will you measure success? Dean: We’ll look at the number of users, look at search volume, look at how other factors are increased as a result of offline spending. Search results will get greater conversion. We’ll essentially look at this investment and see how it makes Kayak more profitable.
Is Kayak profitable? Does a big flashy campaign just mean that we’re in another bubble? Dean: I don’t think this campaign is big or flashy. And I think that we at Kayak think this is an important and necessary investment. I do believe advertising works and large brands have built their businesses on advertising. I don’t think we’re following a bubble as we’re spending efficiently and with impact. We do a lot of online marketing, and we have an enduring commitment to online. Search is very efficient way to reach people. But cost for online advertising has gone up dramatically. Because of the way we’re buying [the air time for the commercials], we can do this more efficiently offline as opposed to online.
Kellie: We’re very closely to being profitable. We’re focusing on building a brand and driving traffic to the site. We’re growing at a faster rate than the OTAs.
Can you explain more about the efficient nature of the TV campaign? Dean: It’s a national network cable buy. The cable you have at home with the Discovery Channel or ESPN, you can buy [ads on those channels] locally or nationally (entire country). We’re also buying syndicated programs. That tends to be shows at 7-8pm (like Seinfeld). And we’re actually buying some network, but very efficient network. We have 2 lengths. 15-seconds and 30-seconds. The 30-second spots have a little more depth of sales. But we felt we were able to tell our story in 15 seconds.
Go back to your car dealership example. We have more flexibility. We don’t have to be on Sunday for a Monday sale. We’re buying a rotation – no specifics, just within a range. A prime rotation (8pm – 11pm). You pay less for that than if you say you want to be on NBC at 8pm on Friday night. It’s efficient for us as we still reach the market we want to reach.
The ads seem to have been created with an online viral strategy in mind? Is this true? Was this the goal form the start? Will you put these ads on MySpace, YouTube, etc? Dean: The ads will be on the website, and we’re having a contest allowing consumers to create their own commercial. The winner gets to see the commercial produced in NYC and then gets to see it on air. You’ll see the ads on YouTube and MySpace. The ads will appear on affiliate sites as streaming videos. This was a contingency for the campaign. Shorter length videos tend to do better on the web. One of the reasons we did 15-seconds is that we knew it would translate better to web use.
The ads are obviously edgy. Is this an effective strategy to drive targeted traffic and get people to actually use the service or is this just to drive traffic? Dean: I agree that we’re going to get a lot of viral activity and PR activity and this is a supplement to our media campaign. We’ll get the paid for media and in effect incremental media because of the viral nature, the buzz. It’s hard before the fact to tell what buzz you’ll get, because it’s not certain. Everyone’s feeling is that this will generate a lot of activity. People will be interested in this and that will provide additional searches for Kayak.
Why did you go with the JibJab look and feel vs. using actors? [I’m a member of the Screen Actor’s Guild (SAG), I’m obviously not too happy…] Dean: We use a style that is kind of web friendly. It doesn’t become too huge to download. We wanted this as cost effectively as possible. If we had gone to all these locations using real actors and real animals and real machinery, it would have taken us years. Also because we own the imagery and music, we have the rights to use it as much as we want. We knew this would be viral, and we didn’t want it to be constrained by union rules. If you want it viral, you have to own it or you have to pay through the nose. From the beginning, those were some of the restraints…although we didn’t think of them as restraints…but that was one of the [requirements] to be able to use it was much as we wanted. It’s the same thing with the music. We bought out the music because we wanted to use it as much as possible. It was written specifically for the campaign.
Guy: Kayak is little known. We have to get people to hear of Kayak before they do a transaction. Once they know how enjoyable an experience Kayak can be, people will come back. First we have to make sure people are aware.
Are you making any changes to your site in conjunction with the campaign? Dean: Yes. We’ve integrated the ‘create your own ad’ promotion and added all the ads to the site.
Anything else? Guy: As a personal statement for Brooklyn Brothers, it takes us into a different sphere. We don’t usually get to be this irreverent. The easiest thing to do in advertising is not be noticed. The guys at Kayak are smart people who realize the impact you can generate with daring work. They constantly pushed us to be as innovative as possible.
Vast launched vacation rental search last week covering over 600,000 vacation properties from over 12,000 sites. I love the filtering capabilities (bedrooms, bathrooms, nightly rate, amenities, activities, etc.).
Vast doesn’t just aggregate a few large vacation rental listings sites: Vast’s web crawl results in more sites and more listings so you’re more likely to find the perfect place when and where you want to travel. You’ll find remote mountain cabins listed on tiny one-page Mom-and-Pop sites that aren’t likely to appear on other vacation rental sites.
Once you decide where to go, you can refine your search by a particular amenity: air conditioning, a BBQ, or a hot tub, for example. Or view only non-smoking rentals. Or only rentals that sleep 8 or more people. Only beachfront properties, etc. Want to bring along Fido or Spot? Simply click on the “Pets OK” link to see only pet-friendly listings.
Why pay attention to Vast? As Bill Burnham said months ago, “If you want to view a good approximation of what Google Base will look like once it is finished, go look at Vast.com.”
Farecast launched it’s public beta today. Wrote about it for SearchDay. Here’s an excerpt…
According to Wikipedia (with a small edit by me), “a market is transparent if much is known by many about: 1) what products and services are available, 2) the price of those products and services, and 3) where those products and services are available. A high degree of transparency can result in disintermediation due to the buyer’s increased knowledge of supply pricing.” As an economics student in college in the mid-late 90s, the theory of transparency was extremely exciting to me because the internet promised to open everything up, empowering the consumer to make informed decisions.
I’d argue that this vision for the consumer facing internet didn’t exactly pan out as planned. And while the travel industry is a lot less opaque than it once was, we’re no where near transparency. This is exactly why I’m so bullish on new ideas in online travel booking. At this point, high booking fees are already a thing of the past for many consumers who use the travel search engines (SideStep, Kayak, Mobissimo, FareChase, etc).
Unfortunately, there’s still no way to know if you’re really getting a good price on your flight. But that could be changing with new offerings from Farecast and FareCompare.
A number of people have talked about the potential power of MySpace getting into search. Well, the company put its toes in the water this morning with the launch of MySpace Jobs, powered by SimplyHired. Back in April, SimplyHired raised $13.5m from Fox Interactive Media (FIM), MySpace’s parent company. At that time, Ross Levinsohn, FIM’s president joined the SimplyHired Board.
When I was first briefed on this story, SimplyHired gave me a run down of the MySpace numbers, saying that the site had 76m members with 42m unique users a month. Well, my ‘network’ is now up to 84m people, so I’d assume that the 42m uniques has risen too. As for the demographics on MySpace, the core user group is 16-34 years old…a demo ripe for summer internships, first jobs, and new jobs…all available through SimplyHired.
