Rice’s Riffs

Jere Doyle of Prospectiv dissects what online lead generation best practices should truly be addressing:
What our industry needs is to come out with firm best practices that address HOW leads are collected and WHAT advertisers do with leads once they get them. Issues such as transparency, data sharing, and misleading promotions need to be [...]

There has been a lot of discussion about Internet lead quality declining. Is it the marketing or the market? I believe it has a lot to do with consumers reacting to the media and the market.
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I wondered how long it would take to get the SEC’s antennas up. He has been backing up dump trucks to the Countrywide corporate headquarters to transport his shares into the market.
BTW, it is not a new trend…
Tags: countrywide, mozilo, stock, shares, SEC

Experian drops more than 7% yesterday as the market discounts their slowing growth attributed to their connectivity and revenue reliance on credit troubled US, UK, and Ireland markets.
Interestingly, Experian quickly and specifically lays the slowing growth at the feet of LowerMyBills:

The group said that in the six months to the end of September, its revenues [...]

Root Markets comes out from behind a long silence with yet another "plan." This one not so radical as Seth Goldstein’s version (past CEO) or different from past AOL plans (subscription). This time it is Yahoo and it doesn’t look so different from good old fashion display ad lead generation.
However, I think the most interesting [...]

As the mortgage market tightens, lead generation companies begin to mount tactical offensive and defensive strategies to position for dwindling Internet originating mortgage companies.
A a recent article by Inman News, "Lead quality a two-sided coin" and commentary from LeadCritic about price increases and my review of the LendingTree Partner Summit seems to have tipped [...]

Where is the next lead generation frontier? I think it is becoming increasingly clear that getting local should be in your strategic plan if you are in the lead generation business. Mike Sachoff, of www.webpronews.com points out the glaring opportunity:

The dollar gap between U.S. local online spending and total local media ad spending is [...]

The debate continues, but increasingly the data seems to support a shift to online advertising; yielding an increase in overall online advertising spend.

“If marketing budgets shrink, and they are often the first to be cut in a downturn, digital will still continue to grow,” said Eric Bader, managing director of digital at MediaVest.
“The focus will [...]

Blown Mortgage highlights a potentially impending trend of companies cutting their non-core entries into the mortgage business:

If you think of all of the companies like E-Trade, AIG, H&R Block that got in to mortgage as an adjunct to their core business models there is still a decent list left of those that will probably make [...]

Adding to my argument for sustainable growth in the online lead generation market…
If you agree with my premise that advertisers are increasingly demanding a shift from CPM to ROI as the effective marketing metric. Then it seems that the Internet Advertising Bureau may have the most compelling statistics:

"The Interactive Advertising Bureau says Internet advertising is [...]