Virtual Offices
Answer My Office Floats Confusing Ad Offering
Published July 1st, 2009 by Jennifer LeClaire
Are advertising networks failing to offer small- to med-sized businesses real value for marketing budgets? Answer My Office (AMO) thinks so.
AMO has teamed up with ReceptionHQ Unite to launch an integrated offline to online telephony advertising platform. What does that mean? That’s what I wanted to know.
At first glance, it seems like these companies may be on to something, but the marketing language doesn’t make it easy to understand exactly what they are offering. From what I gather, it’s some sort of targeted online advertising opportunity with manual analytics. They are calling it the most comprehensive advertising platform ever offered. I somehow doubt that, but I kept reading.
Here’s how it supposedly works, as the companies describe it: Receptionists with customer service and telecommunications skills take inbound calls from an advertisement and compile data from the caller specific to the client’s needs. These analytics show the effectiveness of the companies advertising keyword to phone lead and the lifetime value of that customer. The client accesses this data by logging onto the portal and manually seeing how the sales were completed, the key term that led to the sale and the successful version of the advertisement.
Maybe there’s something I don’t get. But you can accomplish this same goal by offering a promotional code in your advertising, or by setting up a special 800 number connected with a particular ad. I suppose Answer My Office is offering to field the calls, but is this their core competency? I don’t see it. What’s more, I don’t see how a receptionist can determine the lifetime value of a customer. That’s tracked over time, not in one phone call to place an order.
Again, the marketing materials were so convoluted that it was difficult to get a clear picture of what they are doing. They say it’s revolutionary. I wrote the book “Web Analytics For Dummies” and write about search marketing platforms every week. As I see it, there’s nothing here that’s revolutionary or even evolutionary. It seems like hype tapping into the down economy.
Of course, I invite the company to share with us what they are trying to do in plain language so we can better discern the offering. In any case, a virtual office provider does not appear have the core competencies to run an online ad business.
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Maggie Correta July 2nd, 2009 at 10:19 am
I can’t make sense of this either. Its seems really opportunistic for an 800 number to go into an advertising scheme. I can’t see how folks think they can outperform Google or Microsoft’s adCenter or some of the larger ad networks. And so far as analytics go, these networks offer all that. I think they should stick to virtual receptionist services.
Rob Zeus July 2nd, 2009 at 2:25 pm
I don’t get it, no. Sounds like adding an extra step in the process of measuring advertising success. In any case, I don’t think a virtual office provider has any business trying to launch an ad service. I think they’ll be very disappointed in the results, and so will anybody who pays for it.
Bill Brookshire July 2nd, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Hmm. I can see some value in tracking offline ads and working up some data around it, but I don’t see anything new about what they are doing. And I can’t see how a virtual office company has the skillset to do it. This requires more than a virtual receptionist asking a few questions.
Elizabeth Sanchez July 2nd, 2009 at 6:12 pm
You know, Answer My Office is an Australian company. Things could be a bit different over there. Who knows? I can only imagine the tested this concept, or at least I hope they did. In the U.S., I can’t see a virtual office provider succeeding at something like this. But maybe there’s something about this Asian market we don’t understand.
Melanie Jones July 2nd, 2009 at 6:53 pm
I think @Elizabeth may be on to something. Either that, or this virtual office company is sinking a lot of resources into a dead end strategy. With all of the Web analytics gurus out there, though, and even software that tracks offline response, I can’t see how they can compete with the accuracy of an Omniture — though I’m sure they can compete on price.