Long time no post...but anyway.

I run a busy sports site and we hare having difficulty getting "through the door" for site specific campaigns. In the two years we have been represented by a London based selling agency we have had 1 or maybe 2 campaigns booked on the site directly, not for a staggering amount either. We have just been left with the scraps that are network deals (ok some higher deals too but they were book across lots of sites)

We have good traffic: 6 million page impressions a month (not including spiders etc thats from the advertising logs) and 300,000 unique users a month.

We have great demographic survey data:

63% managerial
38% £30,000+
80% Male
Of which:
4% <15
20% 15-24
17% 25-34
29% 35-49
10% 50+

I have a huge norvatis survey with lots of other "interesting" stuff in it too...

Our agency gives us feedback that the buyers have never heard of us etc, and we get described like rivals/footymad but as they are 100% football fans based sites and ours is a mixture with about 50% from Rugby Union its not really correct but I am told that agencies are stupid and they need comparisions to sites they know.

We are scratching our heads to come up with the best way of getting our point accross and explaining that we are flexable etc, as I am the guy that builds the site and deals with the advertising/revenue generation I can be hughly flexable etc over and above banners/skys etc but again "agencies are stupid" is all i get told.

The two rubbish ideas we have come up with so far are:

1) Corporate day out to and England rugby match

2) "Highly original" branded gadget to send to people.

But there are huge problems with those ideas.

1) We are only reasonably going to be able to get 10 people maximum to attend a match on a Saturday and will they be the right people, will all the information about the site and its users we spout on to them get lost when they go back to their larger decision making chain.

2) Its a rubbish idea anyway, if its a good gadget it will be played with for and hour and either binned or given to the kids to break. No way of getting accross any information about the site other than the domain name.

What we need to do is this:

1) Get accross our uniqueness as a website. Think Rivals.net/footymad but for rugby fans but also chuck in Football, cricket and F1.

2) Get accross our flexibility as a marketing tool.

3) To the most amount of people, and the right people.Its probably impossible to do all those things with "one thing" but it must be possible to do it with a few combined things.

Our agency has also said get some press releases out to the industry press, but about what? We are fan driven, we are not a corporate machine with ties in the industry we are a small focused team with a huge user base providing us content and page impressions.

I have suggested freebie campaigns (knowing that to me that sounds desperate) and the agency said those don't help in boosting our profile as a good brand...which is fair enough.

Ideas greatly received!

Cheers
John Wards
http://www.sportnetwork.net

We were with them originally and felt lost within the noise of Official sites and the other sites represented by them. We seemed 2nd or 3rd in line for any discussions about campaigns.

Thanks anyway.

John

Hi,

I' don't know how much you're paying the third party agency to sell space on your site, but it would appear as though they're not really giving you the attentian you deserve. Have you considered taking a sales person on to sell the space or asking one of your staff to spend a couple of mornings a week making sales calls?

Good luck

Alasdair Cross
Director
Adprecision.net

On 13:36:35 18 September 2004 John Wards wrote:
>Also as far as our current agency have told us they feel
>like they are starting from scratch as none of the people
>who should have heard of us have.
>
>Still looking for ideas and suggestions.
>
>John

Anyone?

There must be some one from an agency that can suggest something.

What makes you sit up and take notice of a site?

We have the traffic.

We have the loyalty of our users.

We have the demographics.

We have the flexablity.

Who to I get that accross to the right people?