This installment of the Online Marketing Champion series features John Durham, President of the newly-formed yet “big buzz abounds” San Francisco-based BIG (the Bay Area Interactive Group). The group is a non-profit professional association dedicated to championing innovation in digital marketing to brand marketers, publishers and agencies through educational, networking, and association events. BIG’s first event in early October had some very heavy hitter sponsors including Yahoo, MSN, Google, Fathom Online, ValueClick, and 24/7 Real Media. Sponsorships have now sold out through 2005 and BIG is nearing its corporate goal of 50 corporate sponsors. The group has well over 600 members and growing.

John is also President of Pericles Consulting, whose primary focus is to help advocacy groups and political campaigns use all forms of interactive marketing to promote their ideas and candidates via online marketing initiatives. Most recently, John Durham was Chief Operating Officer of Interep Interactive, which has become the largest independent online ad sales company in the United States, and through co-marketing agreements, the largest Internet rep company in the world. Interep Interactive has three divisions: Winstar Interactive Media, Cybereps and Perfect Circle Media.

In 2003, Interep Interactive has landed some of the best-known brands on (or off) the web including Kiplinger.com; drSpock.com; Expedia.com®; Nasdaq.com; Dr. Phil.com; Morpheus; and five Sony Pictures Entertainment websites. John has been teaching advertising and marketing classes since 1992 and currently teaches advertising in the MBA program at the University of San Francisco.

We talked to John Dunham, President of BIG and innovator in online marketing, about what marketers need to understand to effectively reach customers online as well as the secret to marketing in youth. He shares his thoughts on good marketing, dating and getting a customer to the “buying” altar. John also shared his predictions in regard to the future of online initiatives.

eMarketingIQ: Hi John, congrats on the amazing turnout at your first BIG (Bay Area Interactive Group) event! Tell us about the group and the event.

John Durham: It went fantastic and we had over 500 folks in attendance. And 65 more that signed up for memberships in the group that weren’t there. The idea of BIG’s forming was to bring back the interactive community. It’s coming out of a tough time and we want to grow that next generation of groundbreakers. Our number one focus is on education.

eMarketingIQ: How do you get people to invest more in online marketing? It still seems to be such a challenge for so many companies.

JD: You have to get them engaged and involved. You’ve got to grow them. Senior people want to learn about the industry and all the new tools and the job of any good agency is to help them do that, way beyond getting them to buy in on a campaign. They need to know why they need the campaign and how it’s going to help them. We’ve got folks from HP, Wells Fargo, and higher level people in the agencies coming to BIG to educate themselves and us on what they need and what their concerns are in marketing changes.

eMarketingIQ: What’s a good metaphor for online marketing?

JD: I think a great one that can be used to glean information is comparing it to cable television. The growth of cable was a slow and steady rise and now it’s hot. The same thing can be said for the Web and interactive marketing. In the next few years, it’s going to show solid growth and it’s becoming hot. So, for marketers via the Web they have to look at targeting a specific customer. It’s one on one. Good marketing is like dating. You do a good job and you’re going to walk down the aisle. A good brand is consistently and successfully courting the customer.

eMarketingIQ: What is the marketer’s job?

JD: It is our job to remind them that our products are in their everyday life. We remind them how they influence all that they can accomplish on a daily basis. One of the things I ask when I teach my advertising class at Univ. of San Francisco is “Do you ever pay attention to ads?” And my class will say, “No.” That’s partially because advertisers have forgotten how to get out and look at how people use advertising and the media in the present. For instance, text messaging, IM, and other communication tools. I’ve got 84 students in my class and 79 of them don’t have a landline. They communicate primarily through mobile phones. That’s something marketers need to know and be able to adapt to.

eMarketingIQ: How do the youth of today view ads and marketing? Are they turned off by it?

JD: No, and that’s a good question, because it’s one everyone needs to be asking. It’s been my experience that they welcome ads. They want to be sold to, but you’ve got to be willing to raise the bar creatively because they’re used to all these tools and as a marketer you might not even be as savvy at the use of them as the kids are. I see so much in the youth culture where ads play a part of their lives. A lot of brands are scratching their head and saying, “How do we do this? How do we get in on this?” And I would say the first thing is, don’t stick twelve people in an air-conditioned focus room and think you’re going to find the answer there.

eMarketingIQ: Has the Web made it more difficult for marketers because of the demand for ads to be more relevant to the consumer’s needs?

JD: What the Web has really done is democratize the process. Anyone who is afraid of democracy and afraid of giving real information cannot play a big part on the Web. The power of the Web is getting better and better. Our group wants to grow the next set of marketers who know this.

The marketplace will drive out bad products. You can fact-check a product now, you can compare as a consumer, you can find out fairly easily just via a search engine if what the “brand” is promising is indeed true. If you like it, you can send it to a friend, that’s the whole viral component and it’s fascinating. The reason it’s fascinating is because marketers have absolutely no control over whether their message will get forwarded or not, the only thing they can do is make sure they make their message “forward-worthy.” So that people don’t realize they’re being advertised to, CONTENT is king.

eMarketingIQ: What do you see happening in the next few years with interactive marketing?

JD: The budgets are going to start shifting to interactive. Interactive is not going to replace TV, but if you look at how TV is now with the advent of cable and special interest channels, it’s diffused. The spaces for marketing messages are diffused too. But you can get all of them to work in a complementary fashion. For instance, if you watch the History channel, you can then go to www.historychannel.com and get more information, including ads etc. based around the history channel content. It’s not media channels; it’s life. The same thing holds true for example with the Food network. People are using these resources every day and they don’t realize they’re being “marketed to” because they’re getting value from the content. Rich media will only enhance the opportunities to tell the story that much better.