What I Took Away From IRCE 2010

Last month's Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition (IRCE) in Chicago had all the elements of a healthy trade show — attendance was at record levels with over 10,000 paid attendees; the exhibit floor was packed with booths and customers; and the sessions were well attended. It seemed like everyone in the industry was at the show.

Part of the show's success must have been fueled by the relative upswing of the internet economy. Clearly the web is taking market share away from traditional retail sales. As a whole, many internet-based businesses are experiencing strong growth.

John Deneen, president of SiteForm, a web development company, noted that exhibitors seemed tightly focused on their own niche within the internet world. Gone are the days when internet companies tried to be all things. At this year's IRCE, exhibitors could explain their business to you almost instantly with the following statements:

• “We do PPC and price shopping comparison engine management.”
• “We do behaviorally targeted ads.”
• “We do email append very cost effectively.”
• “We do multichannel attribution management.”

I had some specific niche businesses I needed to understand, so I used my time at the exhibit hall to meet with those businesses. I came away thinking that most, if not all, of the niche businesses that make up the world of internet marketing were well represented at the show.

The behaviorally targeted ad vendors were in full force: Dotomi, FetchBack, Criteo, acerno (a division of Akamai) and Afiniti were all showing why they had the largest network, the best testing, the strongest platform for dynamic ads and all the other points of difference that made them the best-of-breed for behavioral targeted ads.

Dotomi offers a very strong suite of services if you have enough unique monthly visitors for their program. Fetchback had just been purchased by GSI Commerce, and that was big news around the show floor. And lurking in the background was Google, with its plans to launch and dominate the market for behavioral ads as it does for search.

Both email deployment and email append vendors were front and center. Walter Karl displayed a unique program which offers email append services for catalogers’ prospecting circulation lists at costs that appeared nicely affordable. Maybe this is a way to make prospecting with emails a scalable business for catalogers. Walter Karl and FreshAddress also offered proven email append programs. With the growth of email as a proven revenue source, marketers are looking to increase their file of email addresses.

Alan Beychok, president/CEO of Benchmark Brands, parent company of FootSmart, was highlighted on the cover of the IRCE show guide explaining his company's success growing its email revenue by getting really granular with email deployments and segmenting its file rather than blasting emails to everyone.

The Rimm-Kaufman Group (RKG) and Bright Cloud Marketing are two leading providers of pay-per-click services, and both companies speak with rich, deep experience about how they maximize the potential in paid search marketing. RKG is busy developing a tool for multichannel attribution management. If you’ve ever been in a meeting where credit for sales are being allocated between emails, a website, paid search and behaviorally targeted ads, you have some idea of the complexity of allocating internet sales and avoiding double counting where several groups want credit for a sale. If anyone can figure out multichannel attribution, it'll be RKG.

Stamps.com had a unique show service in partnership with the USPS, where it took all of your trade show swag, put it in a priority package and let you mail it back to yourself for free. It was a very tangible way to show that all products purchased online have to get shipped to customers, and that the post office was still a good option for package shipment. In these days of wanting to minimize what we carry through the airport back from a show, not lugging home an extra 15 pounds of materials was a great benefit.

It was great to go to a show where the only talk of the recession was when people asked, “When did the recession seem to end for your business?”

Jim Coogan is president of Catalog Marketing Economics, a Santa Fe, N.M.-based consulting firm focused on catalog circulation planning. Reach Jim at (505) 986-9902 or jcoogan@earthlink.net.