Last week, ATG exhibited at eTail 2007 Palm Desert. What follows is largely stream of consciousness notes of some of the interesting tidbits I heard.

I started the conference with my mini keynote, talking about how personalization was the key to taking advantage of the Long Tail, which led into my introduction of Chris Anderson. He referred back to my personalization pitch a couple of times – as I’ve mentioned before, I think there is a real synergy of ideas between the Long Tail and personalization. (Which I’m sure Chris will get into when he keynotes ATG’s annual user conference, Insight Live 2007.) One person asked about Barry Schwartz’s paradox of choice – the theory in his best-selling book is that people have too many choices. Chris countered that what you need is a “paradise of choice” – this connects back to how personalization helps you find what you want in the Long Tail.

Someone quoted research that 25% of visitors to the top 40 e-commerce sites are driven there by an email blast. 28% are driven there by a search engine.  Email-driven visitors have a higher conversion rate and satisfaction.

There was a panel on ratings and reviews – Home Depot, Smart Bargains and Petco spoke – two are using Bazaar Voice, one Power Reviews. All views were very positive on both vendors.

Organic and Molecular stood out among the interactive agencies.

Gary Briggs, CMO, on how eBay runs marketing:

  • Positioning = battle for the mind – Meaning = promise for the heart
  • They focus a lot on customer feedback.  They do “voices” = big distribution list for customer feedback, 700 employees on distribution list, he gets several email a day on this list from customers. They also do “views” where they go out and sit with a customer for a full day watching their every move to see how they work with eBay. And “visits” where they talk to consumers (as opposed to customers, who are sellers). Their main metric is “share of wallet” – of the money people spend to sell their stuff, and the money consumers spend on line, how much does eBay get. In marketing, they work on both “drumbeats” (stuff you have to do day in day out) and “rockets” (big periodic programs).

A panel on new projects with Neiman Marcus, Overstock.com, Ice.com, others ended up focusing on “customer experience” as major thrust for new projects. This is a term we’ve used on and off for a couple of years…interesting to see it coming more into vogue. (Disclosure: Neiman Marcus is an ATG customer.)

VP of marketing and development of Jones Apparel spoke on technology innovation – focused on Ajax. He asked “why innovate”, and said ROI was an ok reason, but the best reason was because it was fun for developers. He has 18 developers working on Jones sites. He used GAP as example of cool use of Ajax, also the Amazon diamond finder and Netflix quick pop. He said a trend was to drop support for non-javascript/non Ajax browsers – he said Gap has done this.

These notes only begin to scratch the surface of a very interesting conference. Please add to these observations in the comments!

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