A Marriage Proposal Amid A Credit Crisis

October 6, 2008 | By Marc Porcelli | No Comments »

Over the past two weeks I have been largely offline. I flew out to London, England on September 22nd to present at the Internet Dating Conference and attend Ad-tech London. Both shows were very busy and full of new opportunities.

With the weak US dollar, advertisers in the UK and European marketplace are positioned very well to go after more cost effective lead generation. A great means to take advantage of this is to use North-American distribution partners. Anyone interested in receiving my PowerPoint presentation from the Internet Dating Conference can email me at, marcATmarcporcelliDOTcom.

Perhaps what was most interesting about my trip to the UK was not the business being done of the floor, but the credit crisis taking place on Wall Street. It was particularly interesting, hearing about the market conditions watching BBC and Sky News. The perspectives were different that what I was used to, definitely the crisis was presented from a different angle. Notwithstanding how the news was presented, it was still bad and it’s been on my mind.

Fortunately, I had bigger things on my mind…I was planning on proposing to my long-time girlfriend. We were heading to the South of France, specifically Cannes. Having meet my girlfriend on an online dating website (no not on Singlesnet.com, but a competitor to it) it was only appropriate that I purchased the ring online which I did on BlueNile.com!

I was so nervous about the whole ordeal that I actually booked the flight from London to Nice on the wrong day (leaving a day after our pre-paid hotel was expecting us in Cannes). To put this into perspective, I travel 40% of the year and I haven’t made a travel booking mistake in years. Long story short and a nice little change-fee later we arrived in Nice a few hours after I had anticipated we would. We spent Friday checking out Cannes and seeing the sites.

Then came Saturday. On Sunday we would be heading to Paris to spend a four days there. I did not want to propose in Paris, as it’s such a typical proposal spot for tourists. I had decided on Friday that I as going to propose for sure on Saturday. I arranged a car to pick us up and to take us to the village of Eze. Eze is a mid evil town situated about 5 KLMs from Monaco and just minuets from the Italian boarder at the top of a mountain with amazing views. It was about a 45 minute drive from Cannes. The town itself does not allow cars in it’s cobblestone streets, which makes it quite unique, particularly as it’s hundreds of years old.

As we drove up the mountain, I noticed clear skies and just a few clouds. Our driver let us off at this private walkway, which after walking for a few mineuts is where I proposed overlooking the Mediterranean Ocean just before sunset. Although I was not able to remember what hand, let alone what finger the ring went on, my then girlfriend and now Fiance said yes. We had dinner at Le Chateau De Le Chevre D’or. It was definitely a night to remember.

While in Paris a few days later, I caught a bit of the news – the credit crisis was alive and kicking. My mind immediately started thinking again about the impact on online advertising. Display advertising as we all know has taken a hit, particularly in the financial and mortgage verticals. Another huge online vertical, education will undoubtedly also experience pull-backs and decreases in spend. Overall most display verticals will experience pull-backs, particularly campaigns associated with, “branding.” Being in the DR space, this is not at all a bad thing.

So how will this affect advertisers? Coming from the perspective of being one of the larger DR advertisers online, I view the macroeconomic conditions as a tremendous opportunity. Now is not the time to pull-back on ad-spend, but to expand. DR advertisers should be negotiating for more competitive CPM’s and demand CPA. As an advertiser, DR or not, CPA should be the first priority. Consumers will likely pull back on some of their spending, but they will of course still spend.

* In the coming posts to this blog, I will be focusing on recession marketing online and best practices for monetizing users that are coming to your site.

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Category: Media Buying, Monitization, Online Marketing, Optimization, Recession Marketing, UK Marketing

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