Overture... loin loin derrière

Ce matin j'ai lu un article de Perry Marshall, espèce de guru du marketing Internet. Il assistait à la conférence X10seminar.com qui se déroulait en Australie sur les prochaines percées dans le domaine.

Voici où en est Ouverture, l'engin de rechercher derrière Yahoo, MSN et quelques autres engins de recherche. Quand on pense que cette compagnie a quand même eu le temps de comprendre où allait le marché de la publicité sut Internet, c'est vraiment désolant.

There was only *one* part of the X10 seminar
that wasn't received with tremendous enthusiasm,
and that was Overture.

The gales of laughter and the stares of total disbelief
were priceless.

(Overture, Google's rival search engine in
the Pay Per Click game, powers Yahoo, MSN
and many other search engine. Originally
GoTo.com, they pioneered the PPC concept
which has totally revolutionized the web.)

Overture sent a couple of representatives
to the seminar to give a presentation, and
things started going downhill when a woman
who's relatively new to this stuff asked
a rather innocent question:

Attendee: 'Let's say my business does window
screen repair and there's suddenly a hailstorm in
Sydney, and I want to get on the web right away
and advertise that I repair hail-damaged windows.
How long does it take before my ad appears?'

Overture: 'Why would you want to do that?'

Attendee: 'Because I'd like people to come to
my website right away and have me fix their
screens because of the hailstorm.'

Overture: 'But that's not what you do; you
just fix screens. Your business isn't about
hailstorms.'

Attendee: 'Yes it is! And if there was suddenly
a hailstorm, I'd like them to find my website
right away and ring me up.'

Overture: 'But if your website doesn't have
any pages about hailstorms, we can't approve
your ad. Your website would have to be about
wind screen damage from hailstorms, because we
have very stringent relevancy requirements
so that people who search get only the best
results.'

Attendee: 'So if I put up a page about hail
storm damage repair, how long does it take
for my ad to show up?'

Overture: '3-7 days.'

Attendee: '3-7 days??? Whatever for? People
want to fix hail damaged windows today, not 7
days from now.'

Overture: 'That's why it's really important
to already be advertising with Overture,
even if your bids are really small, so that
if something like this happens, you can
increase your bids and become more visible,
which only takes 2 minutes. We only charge
you a minimum of $25 per month. Otherwise
your ads would need to be approved by our
content editors, which takes 3-7 days.'

Attendee: 'OK, so let's say my ads are already
running and I just want to change them to
say I repair hail damage, how long would that
take?'

Overture: 'Why would you want to do that? Your
ads already say that you repair windows.'

Attendee: 'Because if a hailstorm just happened,
and people would be thinking about hail damage.'

Overture: 'Why would you want to do that?'

Attendee: 'Because we're marketers!'

Overture: 'You need to understand, we have
a very stringent editorial process to make
sure that only ads that meet our 80 pages
of content requirements are approved, and
people who search only see the most relevant
possible listings from our advertisers.'

And so it went. 'Overture, we want your
service to be instantaneous, not take 3-7 days.'
'Oh no, Mr. Customer, our editors know better than
you and we're not going to let your ads show
up right away.'

Needless to say the conversations in the
terrace after that particular session was over
were... um, pretty humorous. There was mirth
and laughter at Overture's expense.

Vive Google AdWords. Qu'est-ce que vous voulez? Quand on est leader et que le reste de votre compétition arrive même pas à vous suivre, même après plus d'un an.