More for Less: DISPATCHES
FROM THE FRONT LINES ON MARKETING AND ADVERTISING TECHNIQUES THAT DELIVER
THE BIGGEST BANG FOR YOUR BUCKS. Viral marketing Everyone still wants a piece of this one. In fact, investment firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, whose Steve Jurvetson coined the term, says it won't consider funding companies whose business plans don't contain at least a germ of the idea, which involves getting your customers pass your marketing messages along to friends and associates. Comet Systems is a New York technology company that offers Web users and publishers a cuter Web pointer. It provides a client-side plug-in; when users who have downloaded the plug-in visit a site that has licensed the Comet Cursor technology, the cursor changes, on that site only, from the usual arrow to a tiny graphic. The sites pass along the technology to users via a link to a download URL, so in this case, the viral model is not user-to-user, but trusted-Website-to-user. Comet claims it hasn't run a single ad in the Comet Cursor's two-year history. With 40 million users, it has repeatedly cracked the Nielsen//NetRatings weekly top 25 Web properties list beginning last April. Ben Austin, Comet's director of marketing, says the decision to go the viral route and eschew advertising was a philosophical one. "Advertising in the early stages of a company is an intensely risky endeavor," he says. Instead, Comet has spent its time learning from its users. Its original model was B-to-B; it planned to license its technology to Web publishers such as Mattel, Comedy Central, and Warner Bros. Online, which used it to turn cursors on its site into such things as the WB logo and Bugs Bunny. "When we deployed cursor changing with our large customers," Austin says, "thousands of people began writing us, saying that they wanted dog cursors and cat cursors and Christian cursors and Japanese-flag cursors."
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