Seek’s Spindoctors at Work Again.
January 10, 2008 by Geoff Jennings
I received this email from my friendly Account Manager at Seek.com.au containing the following:
“Improve your targeting of Jobseekers by standing out from the crowd with a SEEK StandOut. AdSEEK StandOut Ads are NEW and have been developed in response to Jobseeker feedback telling us that they want to see more relevant information on the search results page.
By upgrading your Standard Ad to a SEEK StandOut Ad, you’ll be able to include more information in the search results to help you communicate more relevant detail about the job, thus helping improve the performance of your Job Ad.”
“What’s wrong with this picture??
In order to demonstrate, consider this analogy: your local GP gets a lot of feedback to the effect that people are dissatisfied with her method of diagnosis. It’s often inaccurate, time-consuming and painful. That GP, she learns about a method of improving her diagnosis to eliminate these problems. The method doesn’t cost her much to invest in and she understands that it’s what’s called for. She makes an announcement that if folks want the improved diagnostic method, they can pay extra.
All those who don’t pay can stick with the old way.What happens in this situation, besides the tricky moral issues, is that, of course, everyone wants the new method and it becomes standard practice. Those who don’t take it up, if you want to put it in evolutionary terms, die off, and those who are wealthy enough, survive.Problem is, and here’s my point, each year, new methods become available, in response to “the needs of the market” and each year, prices go up and up, for what should be something provided at the standard cost by a business that is proactive and responsive to the market, not one that is simply interested in finding an excuse to increase the cost of its service.
The innovators, Mycareer.com.au, are also guilty as they were the first to trial, ‘Enhanced Listings’, last year.
Careerone.com.au seem to have scrapped their priorty listings in the new design and are focusing more on branding with the employer profiles.
How are the job boards going to squeeze the next lot of dollars from us? My advice, always see through the spin from the…doctors.
It is an unfortunate sign of the times that a service provider expects you to pay more for what should already be part of a paid service. Only a market leader would have the audacity to do such a thing. I think this is why we refer to services such as Seek as ‘Necessary Evil’s”.
This just gives their clients all the more reason to experiment with alternative services.
I’m surprised you think the delivery of greater value should always be free. Apart from SEEK Volunteer and http://www.findajobinafrica.com, I’m not aware of any job board operating as a not-for-profit.
Like any job board, we develop products that meet the needs of jobseekers, advertisers and where appropriate, shareholders. We never develop products that only meet the need of the shareholders.
By meeting the needs of jobseekers, advertisers and shareholder value is always created, and we therefore focus on the first two. This philosophy underpins products like Video Ads which we have just introduced, which will never have a price tag but we expect to increasingly meet the needs of all of our stakeholders.
In introducing StandOut Ads, we’re carefully responding to the two sets of needs: the many advertisers who asked us to create something for them along these lines and jobseekers who have quite clearly said to us that they’d like more information about an ad’s job and employer at the search results level.
Advertisers have for some time been asking us for more options by which they can achieve greater prominence on SEEK.
We initially introduced Premium Listings to meet that need, and the response by both jobseekers and advertisers was very good indeed. The product is sold out six months in advance in some classifications, and jobseekers are responding to these ads over 300% more than they do to normal ads.
Despite this success, there was further feedback from advertisers that they’d like another way to promote themselves that didn’t involve the exclusive inventory of Premium Listings, and was targeted at a lower price point for a more moderate uplift in ad performance. StandOut Ads meets those needs.
The idea that StandOut Ads is a backdoor price rise on standard inventory is simply incorrect. If we wanted to raise prices we would simply have raised the prices, rather than developing a new product.
Our goal is absolutely not to have all ads as StandOut Ads. Advertisers have been absolutely scathing about other similar products in the market that they are forced to buy because everyone else has bought one, and we are very keen to avoid such a scenario.
The idea that SEEK StandOut Ads give our customers a reason to experiment with alternative services is also somewhat misplaced.
While advertisers already have many choices,
I expect many advertisers to opt for a $20 StandOut Ad viewed by 2.3 million monthly users, before they experiment with a $150 + advert on a website with 1.3 million fewer visitors, or indeed a $33 advert on a website with traffic that is not spoken about in public.
How is this different to what newspapers have been doing for years? You can pay $20 and have your 3 lines of plain text at at the back of the paper or you can pay $10,000,000,000 and have a colour ad on the front page.
Similarly with outdoor advertising. You can pay a few hundred dollars to have your ad on a bus stop in Liverpool or you can waste tens of thousands for one on a bridge over a freeway.
Not different at all, perfectly normal in fact.
Think First Class vs Business vs Economy, or a 1,3,5 or 7 series BMW or super-sized fries.
Not too much Spin Doctoring in any of those as far as I can tell.
Just more bang for buck.
In the case of the traditional upsell, it is the purchaser who is making the decision about whether or not to spend the extra dollars on going up a grade.
In this case, it is the jobseekers who are demanding more info in the ads, not the advertisers who are paying the fees.
Point is, there will be a time in the future where those supplying the advertising dollars will be left with no choice but to supersize in order to keep up with the market.
We’re not asking to upgrade, as is the case when we go into our BMW dealership and go the 7 series over the 3.
If you need to meet the demands of the viewers of your site…YOU pay for it!
I agree the analogy doesn’t quite stack up since there is only one purchaser per airline seat or BMW whereas here we have two parties to accommodate here, but only one is paying.
We’re firmly against the idea of forcing people to buy upsells. As I said before, we’ve heard the very strong negative feedback about this from clients who have bought similar products on other classifieds sites.
Moreover, its simply not in our interest to go down that route. There is a certain amount of money in the market that people will pay for these types of upsell.
We can try acquire that as revenue either by aiming to have 100% of our ads upsold at a certain price point or by having a much lower percentage of our ads upsold at a higher price point.
The latter obviously makes more sense because we know that our customers don’t see value in being forced to buy a product that everyone else has and we’d be somewhat short-sighted to permanently give up the ability to upsell for the long term simply to get some short term revenue by upsetting customer relationships.
Hence my previous post that states we’ve taken active steps to ensure that a. not all advertisers buy this product b. to actively avoid having the site flooded with this product.
I’m glad that we had the opportunity to air this issue, as it’s an important one for those of us who pay for the service of job boards such as Seek and MyCareer.
Carey’s comments have reassured us that Seek does not intend to go down the same path as MyCareer has in regard to this advertising policy.
Time will be the test of whether or not these assurances are simply an attempt to placate the market.