Swede success



Having ridden the Boo.com roller-coaster and survived, Charlotte Neser is now plotting the next wave of creative online ad campaigns



The future of online advertising is bad Swedish karaoke. This isn't the ravings of a crazed marketing exec, driven insane by the recent downturn. And it's not a clever pitch from the manager of the latest Abba tribute band.

This is the view of Charlotte Neser, the self-possessed and entirely sane MD of Abel & Baker's UK operation. To prove her point, she's showing off a microsite created by its parent agency for MTV and MSN, on which a succession of singing Scandinavians enthusiastically murder Aqua's Around The World, Jingle Bells and Wham!'s
Last Christmas.

More of that later. Sweden has played a pivotal role in Charlotte's career so far. Her entry into the industry came courtesy of Boo.com, where she started as a PA but quickly rose to VP of Europe and new markets. When the company crashed, she thumbed through her contacts book and landed the job of launching Abel & Baker's London
office.

Opening an interactive advertising agency just as the UK new media industry went into meltdown may have seemed a curious decision. Still, in the year since, Abel & Baker UK has won several big-name clients in its own right, including the AA, Clerical Medical and FHM. This spring, the agency will be unveiling a new pan-European campaign
for Adidas, marking its arrival in the big league.

Continued...



KARAOKE QUEEN
Anyway, that karaoke site. Sure, it's good for a cheap laugh, but it also shows where Charlotte believes online ad campaigns are moving. It's all about the technology, which combines the Net with the good old-fashioned telephone.

Here's how it works. Visitors to the site can listen to other people's renditions, but more importantly can dial a phone number and record their own. These are then put up on the site and voted on by other users to produce a chart.

Phone Karaoke Challenge is the third Abel & Baker project to use this kind of technology, following in the footsteps of two microsite campaigns last year for Scandinavian portal site Spray and mortgage provider SBAB. The Spray Savanna enabled users to call up and record animal noises for on-screen characters, which could then be
listened to by other visitors to the site.

Meanwhile, the SBAB site got people to call up and leave voicemail messages for their existing mortgage provider, saying why they wanted to change. All three campaigns combined a left-field creative concept with innovative use of technology. There were other benefits too.

"A lot of clients are currently looking for revenue-generating opportunities," says Charlotte. "Campaigns like this involve premium phone lines, so they have the potential to justify their cost, or even make money."


BANNER BONANZA
Although Charlotte believes this type of campaign will become more popular in the year ahead, this doesn't mean she thinks the traditional banner ad is dead. Far from it. She points to the emergence of two new technologies as evidence that the humble rectangle is still very much alive.

The first is PinPointer, developed by a company called Targian. It enables banner ads to be targeted using geographic, demographic and connection-specific information. For the SBAB campaign, it was used to ensure the
banners advertising the microsite were served up to people living in areas where more people owned their own homes. Click-through rates were as high as 13 per cent.

"Media targeting tools like that, combined with really interesting creative is the killer formula that people have been waiting for," says Charlotte. "Clients are excited, because every pound is spent more effectively. It gives us that extra layer."

She's also excited by the work of a company called Connextra, and its LiveAd and ActiveAd technology. LiveAd enables information within banners to be updated in realtime. So, for example, an online retailer having a sale of 100 PCs can place banners that accurately show how many are left.

"Before, we'd just create one banner that said '100 PCs for sale'," says Charlotte. "But by the time you clicked on it, they might all have gone. Now, we can have a live feed saying there are 50 left, 40 left and so on. That's got practical use for clients."

Meanwhile, ActiveAd enables banners to analyse the page they appear on and adapt their content to match the subject. For example, a general offer on a football site might be changed to live odds for a specific match when the user is reading about that game. It's technologies such as these that have convinced Charlotte that banner
ads have a future.

"Our view is that there's lots of potential in the banner and traditional formats that hasn't been explored," she says. "They're only as limited as your imagination. With technologies like this arriving, we can start getting
those click-through rates up higher than the 0.2 or 0.3 per cent we've been used to. Some of our best work has been in traditional formats."

CREATIVE COMPARISON
Despite this assertion, it's clear that Charlotte is itching to roll out some of Abel & Baker's most imaginative ideas for UK clients - Phone Karaoke Challenge, Spray Savanna and SBAB were all based in Sweden. Charlotte's views on why the UK hasn't seen these kinds of creative campaigns are forthright.

"I know a lot of UK agencies will get quite defensive about this," she says, "but I don't think the stuff coming out of here is as original as in Sweden. These campaigns are really lateral in terms of the thinking, and I haven't seen anything like that here."

Her views are sure to unleash howls of protest among British agencies, but she does qualify them by pointing out that it's also partly down to clients' attitudes. In the UK, she claims, many clients have only seen banner ads and email campaigns, and haven't been exposed to this kind of thinking.

With more high-profile case studies to go on, Swedish clients are more willing to fund creatively adventurous campaigns. Charlotte also believes that there's a better industry structure in Sweden for companies such as Abel & Baker, who position themselves as interactive advertising agencies.

"It's actually still quite a new idea in the UK," she says. "Here, clients have been used to their normal roster of an above-the-line agency, a PR agency, a media agency and maybe an agency which does their website design. In Sweden, clients are already used to also having an interactive advertising agency."

She also points out that interactive agencies get brought into the process much earlier in Sweden than in the UK, where they're still often only briefed once the media planning and buying has been done, and the offline campaigns have been completed. "It's much harder to come up with an interactive idea that's right for a brand
when you've got less time to work with," she complains.

BUSINESS STUFF
It's been a harsh year for interactive agencies of all kinds, wherever they are in the world. As the new economy boom turned to bust, many experts predicted that online advertising spend would plummet. It's true that many sites have seen their ad revenue drop like a stone, while recent fears of an imminent global recession have seen
marketing budgets slashed both on and offline.

Still, Charlotte remains defiantly optimistic, pointing out that interactive channels are actually improving their share of the overall marketing spend. "Clients are shifting their budgets," she says. "On average, people
used to spend 5 per cent of their marketing budgets on interactive, and 95 per cent on other mediums. We're seeing our share go up month on month, year on year."

The theory is that many clients are pulling their money out of pure TV or press branding, but ploughing some of it back into online campaigns. Why? Because they're more accountable. Even in the current climate, businesses still want to retain their customers, and they still want to acquire new ones.

For firms such as Abel & Baker, the key to survival lies in convincing them that online is the best way to achieve this. "I often get people telling me that Net advertising isn't cost-effective," says Charlotte. "But when you sit down and ask how much a lead costs using direct mail, and compare that with the Internet, it almost inevitably comes out in favour of interactive channels. They can see it's accountable."

LESSONS LEARNED
This is good news for interactive agencies such as Abel & Baker, but the climate is still harsh. There's a lot of agencies scrabbling for relatively few clients, whose budgets are usually limited. Charlotte thinks this will at least help agencies to keep their growth plans manageable.

"Hopefully everyone who's been in the industry for the last few years has learned from the high-profile mistakes they've seen," she says. "Two years ago, there was an obsession with doing everything the biggest, the best, the quickest and the fastest. "Everyone wanted to dominate the world, whereas now they're more focused on getting
their positioning right and then growing at a steady rate."

She points out that this was often based on unrealistic predictions about how fast Internet penetration would increase, and how much consumers would be prepared to spend online. In both cases, progress was much slower than
expected. The sort of figures that were predicted for 1998 and 1999 are only being reached now.
"The original vision of what the Internet can do and how it can transform people's lives is still valid," she says. "It's just that the bubble that a lot of business plans were built on has burst. That's a good thing, though. People are now a bit more cautious."

BOO HOO
Of course, Charlotte speaks from experience, having been one of the pivotal figures in the rise and fall of Boo.com. In Ernst Malmsten's book, Boo Hoo, she comes across as one of the unsung heroes, dashing around the globe opening up local offices and negotiating with suppliers.

The book is a fast-paced business thriller that claims to give the real story behind the Boo myth. "Obviously, it's Ernst's account, and it's written from his perspective," says Charlotte. "But a lot of ex-Boo people I've
spoken to feel quite proud that the book reflects how hard we all worked, and how passionate we were. Obviously, a lot of negative things got reported in the press, but the book shows the positive side that people didn't know about."

Whatever you think of Boo, it's undeniable that the people who worked there have mostly gone on to better things - Charlotte wasn't the only person to quickly find work elsewhere in the industry. Thus, the lessons they learned
from the company's collapse have since benefited other Internet operations.

Charlotte is determined to ensure Abel & Baker profits from her experiences. "I do feel privileged to have been part of an extraordinary time," she says. "What I think we all need to do is learn from that, and put into practice the lessons of that experience."

TEXT: STUART DREDGE / PHOTOGRAPHY: NEIL MACKENZIE MATTHEWS