Very rarely do I come across agencies and consultancies who are willing to do business on a pay for performance basis.
So I was a bit surprised to sit in a workshop organized by www.pinstorm.com , by a gentleman called Mahesh Murthy.
Often in my experience in marketing implementation, I have had a hard time in getting agencies to move beyond commission to fees. In the digital world, while cost per lead is passe, it has been difficult to pin digital agencies down to cost per sales.
So it was with great interest that I listened to Mahesh, when he described a case study of how they are getting transaction fees for every ticket booked on Jet Airways. They are able to do so since they have full control of campaign implementation. They design different landing pages depending on the search word, which has ensured that transactions on Jet Airways has gone up. So for example if you had to buy a Delhi to Goa, ticket they will take you to specific page with Delhi & Goa already filled on the ticket engine, instead of taking you to the generic homepage of Jet Airways. They will throw up a different landing page if you typed Goa to Delhi ticket.
Before agreeing to the cost per sale model, they audit the client's product and then agree on whether their digital marketing implementation can be on a cost per sale basis. This is very similar to a business health check that we do before taking up a strategy implementation programme.
They try various experiments and keep the experiments that work. Marketing, I have always believed, is more a lab experiment kind of a science.
The ownership, accountability and cutting their teeth in their client's business is an extremely good example of how all marketing implementation should be. This is so far removed from the old world model of taking my commission home irrespective of what happened to the client's business.
As a practitioner of strategy implementation, I get great comfort in knowing that there are agencies who are willing to talk the language of results, pilots, ownership, experiment etc.
Mahesh ended the workshop saying he was figuring how to track that a store's footfall to a digital campaign activity. If he manages to do that a lot of empty stores will be able to adopt his cost per sale , or in these depressing times at least a cost per footfall model.
Way to go Pinstorm!
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