Rob Rosen is marketing manager responsible for all online advertising initiatives at Capella University-- an accredited online university with more than 13,000 learners. His responsibilities include strategic development and execution of all lead generation and brand awareness initiatives through the online advertising channel. This includes aggregators, affiliate marketing, paid search and web media programs. He oversees the budgets for all online initiatives and manages the execution via Capella's interactive agency of record, Avenue A/Razorfish.
iMedia: What's your current greatest challenge when it comes to marketing in general, and interactive marketing, specifically? How are you tackling it/them?
Rob Rosen: In being an accredited online university, our core focus from an advertising perspective has been lead generation through online advertising. Therefore, we haven't had the obstacles of whether or not online is a good place to spend our dollars. The big challenge comes whether we should move dollars from DR-focused tactics to brand. Specifically, our industry has been built off of lead aggregators / brokers / directories. We buy on a cost-per-lead basis, and things are relatively efficient. The problem is costs continue to rise, and we are losing more and more control of how our name, message and brand are being promoted online. Therefore, we are constantly trying to learn as much as we can about the traditional online advertising vehicles as they relate to lead generation, so we don't have to be as beholden to the aggregator / broker world.
iMedia: With which online marketing tools (email, behavioral targeting, display advertising, et cetera) has your company experienced marketing success in recent months?
Rosen: Since the majority of our dollars are in the aggregator / broker / directory world, we have not directly done a lot of what I would call traditional online advertising. However, we have had some success from both a DR and branding perspective in display advertising, behavioral targeting, paid search and other tools. These tactics are becoming more and more efficient with testing and optimizing, plus we have more brand control.
iMedia: With regard to this success, what are some lessons learned that you can share with our audience? What worked? What were some challenges and how did you overcome them?
Rosen: It is extremely important to have your agency aligned with IT so tracking and metrics can be implemented in a clear manner.
iMedia: Think about your company's favorite online marketing tool or mix of tools. What advice would you give to marketers interested in trying these out for the first time?
Rosen: Be very careful of the performance-based marketing organizations (aggregators / brokers / directories). Make sure you have a clear understanding of your objectives and have the metrics in place to track success. Otherwise, marketers will be taken advantage of, and it could cause a lot of unwise money to be spent. This goes for brand and DR objectives.
Always have a clear understanding of your objectives / goals and how you want your brand to be portrayed.
A lot of new ideas are out there; we as marketers need to make sure we are looking at them with a critical eye.
iMedia: What's the most out-of-the-box thing you've done in your marketing efforts to reach a hard-to-reach demographic or meet a specific goal?
Rosen: Our lead generation program, while not necessarily unique to our industry, has been working well and is different than a lot of industries. I'm also happy with the re-messaging programs we've targeted to people who've visited our sites. We've seen great success from a conversion standpoint and are also looking at these programs to reinforce our brand to current students.
iMedia: Online video is coming of age. Has it impacted your marketing yet? Do you plan to do more of it soon?
Rosen: Not yet from an advertising perspective. We are using video more and more on our website and plan to incorporate it as both a brand vehicle and a DR vehicle in our online advertising efforts.
iMedia: Consumer-generated content is scary for many brands because of their inability to control it. How do you view the topic? Have you had much experience dealing with it yet? Any advice for other marketers?
Rosen: We take a very controlled but open approach to consumer-generated content. When you are focusing on quality education and have so many great learner stories, it's hard not to be involved in this area. We have a lot of learners that are interested in talking about our school and what their education has done for them. However, from a corporate perspective, we are hesitant to let them run loose without having some control in place from our end.
We work with publishers on using our learners as bloggers for "online education." We have given our learners a way to create blogs. And we are in the process of giving our learners the opportunity to create podcasts.
iMedia: Is there another brand you admire for how its agencies are using interactive media to either increase branding or sell it? If so, why and what have you learned from that brand?
Rosen: I think the movie and television industries in general have done some great things with video, day parting and unique ad placements. It goes to show that page takeovers and ownership of sites can really be impactful to consumers.
iMedia: What are you most proud of from the past year? Why, and what should other marketers learn from that?
Rosen: Even though we are an accredited "online" university, we've really had to educate our internal people on the strengths of online advertising, from both a direct response and a brand perspective. We've come a long way in the last year to do this, and it has helped us in our plans for 2006. Marketers should know that education to internal constituencies does pay off.
Dawn Anfuso is senior editor of iMedia Connection.
