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2007-02-28 - Matt Wise Interviewed

President & CEO of Q Interactive

Basic Information:

Full name: Matt Wise
Title: President & CEO
Company: Q Interactive
# years in biz: I’ve spent 11 years in interactive marketing
Corp. type: Private
Age: 36
Marital status: Married
# Kids: Three
Home town: Birmingham, AL
Place of current residence: Chicago

Company mission: Our 2007 mission is to continue to increase our penetration with traditional brands and agencies who are moving dollars from offline to online while making advertisers aware that lead generation and consumer requested marketing are the all-important first step in beginning a dialogue with their target consumers and that it's far more cost-efficient.

Detailed Information:

Why did you join the company? I worked in start-ups early in my career and then spent a good amount of time in traditional direct marketing. I was hungry to get back to the quickly evolving world of the Internet and wanted more of that entrepreneurial feeling. This was always a company I admired for its ability to take chances and differentiate itself.

What industry publications do you read? AdvertisingAge, Adweek, Brandweek, BusinessWeek, Crain’s Chicago Business, DIRECT, DM News, Inc., Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, MEDIA, OMMA, along with the local and national newspapers.

How often do you travel? Where? I travel fairly often, splitting my time on the road between industry conferences, checking in with our parent company Landmark Communications and meeting with our advertisers and Network partners.

Which trade shows do you attend? Do you exhibit? Ad-Tech, IAB conferences including the Leadership Forum on Performance Marketing, the MIXX Conference, various DMA conferences, Chicago Association of Direct Marketers, etc. We exhibit or sponsor a number of conferences including AdTech, IAB shows and the Annual DMA conference among others.

What is your overall goal for your business? To become the foremost experts all brands turn to for Customer Requested Marketing initiatives.

How many employees do you have? 125

Are you hiring? What positions? Yes, we are hiring. All job descriptions are listed in the careers section of our website (http://careers.qinteractive.com/home.asp), but the current openings are: Sales Specialist, Production Specialist, Product Manager, Product Analyst, Partnership Sales Manager, Database Administrator and Temporary Developer/DBA.

How do you market your business? We advertise in targeted publications, write bylines for several industry publications, speak at industry conferences, publish white papers and utilize public relations to keep our name in the marketplace.

How many advertisers do you have? We have over 1500 advertisers, including more than half of the nation’s Top 100 advertisers as ranked by AdvertisingAge.

Do you own your own sites? Which ones? Yes, we own several of our own consumer sites including, www.CoolSavings.com, www.FreeStyleRewards.com and www.GrabbitRabbit.com.

Do you have your own lead scrubbing and delivery technology or do you license it? If you license, from who? We employ our own proprietary solutions to scrub leads. Built and constantly improved upon over the last eight years, our technology has scrubbed tens of millions of leads using in excess of 10,000 data points.

Do you specialize in something else besides lead gen? Yes, e-mail. Through our proprietary TrueConversion Engine—which powers our advertising network—we drive typical response rates of 10-20% for highly targeted e-mail. In addition, not only is our e-mail service is 100% permission-based and CAN-SPAM compliant, we also have a stringent, ongoing partner certification process to ensure our network partners meet our high standards.

Have you tried any new lead gen methods? If so, which ones? We are constantly testing and implementing new lead gen methods, including click-to-call, microsites, search and banners. One of our more successful innovations has been our unique Soft Offer Scoring solution, which combines offline modeling methodologies with rich consumer data to create custom models that target soft offers only to consumers who have a high propensity to pay. On average, we’ve increased the pay-up rate for magazine and continuity club ‘bill me’ offers by 28 percent with Soft Offer Scoring.

Do you broker your advertiser’s offer to get them more leads? We do broker leads, but we are extremely careful in choosing our partners and don’t allow our advertisers to be circulated through affiliate networks. We host all offers through our own technology and run all leads through our exhaustive lead validation and scrubbing system before they are sent to the advertiser to maintain the highest quality.

If so, how many affiliates/publishers do you work with? We operate an extensive advertising network, The Q Network, with more than 1000 high traffic partner sites, including Weather.com, About.com, and Knight Ridder newspaper sites.

Give us your 30 sec sales pitch to potential advertisers.
Q Interactive is an online marketing services provider that specializes in helping advertisers acquire permission to market to their target consumers.

We operate the largest lead generation-focused advertising network with more than 1000 partner sites like About.com and weather.com, as well as our own consumer Web properties like CoolSavings.com.

We provide lead generation & targeted e-mail services for more than 1500 advertisers per year like Pepsi and Procter & Gamble.

What makes Q Interactive different from other players is that we have a proprietary targeting system—the TrueConversion Engine—which uses a unique combination of demographic, behavioral and transactional data to deliver more relevant advertising and better quality results.

What do you feel are the true benefits of online lead generation? Simply put, it allows direct marketers and brand marketers alike to begin a permission-based dialogue with their ideal customers in a highly cost-efficient manner. Getting explicit permission to communicate with an interested consumer is a fundamental step in relationship building where the consumer is considerably further along in the purchase cycle than those found through other vehicles that are designed simply to drive traffic.

If you could change something about the coreg biz what would it be and why? I’d love to get rid of the unethical players – the ones who bury permission in their terms & conditions instead of collecting clear and conspicuous consent from consumers upfront. These practices are bad for lead quality, bad for the consumer and bad for the longevity of our industry.

Who is your ideal client? One who views us as a true partner and is completely open with us. The clients who provide feedback loops on conversion data and are open to creative suggestions (from offer to form design) are the clients who witness us blowing the doors off their offers.

How many clients have you sent to collections? Any scammers you’d like to make others aware of? We have an extremely stringent screening/filtering process before we let any advertiser in our system, so our collections rate is substantially higher than the industry norm.

How has your business evolved since you started it? Early on, the company was widely recognized as the leading provider of Printable and Online Coupons. Subsequently, the growing needs of marketers prompted us to expand into the areas of Lead Generation and E-Mail, helping top advertisers generate qualified leads for their outbound direct mail, e-mail and telemarketing efforts and drive in-store and online sales. Today, in fact, Q Interactive is one of the industry’s premier Lead Generation providers, delivering approximately one hundred million leads per year for a diverse client base that includes high-value brand name clients in a variety of industries like retail, CPG, pharmaceutical, education, travel, financial services and media and entertainment.

What are the next steps for your business? We will continue to develop the next generation in data analytics and modeling to increase online advertising relevancy and match the right offers to the right consumers. We are continually enhancing our data verification systems and innovating new ways to present online lead generation and e-mail offers to consumers based on their behavior and interests. Basically, our goal is to deliver the true 1:1 marketing promised at the advent of online advertising.

Interviewed by: Lindsay Mure, Editor-In-Chief

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© 2007 The Coreg Insider