Those Free AOL CDs Were a Campaign for Web Domination. It Worked.

Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

By Brian McCullough2014-08-21 18:15:14 UTC

For his day job, Brian McCullough is the CEO of ResumeWriters.com and has founded several companies in the online careers space. He started the Internet History Podcast as a crowd-sourced history project in February of this year. You can subscribe to the podcast here.

Jan Brandt is a legend in the world of marketing. She singlehandedly led the famous AOL carpet-bombing campaign that put millions of AOL trial discs and CDs in everything from magazines to popcorn boxes to banks. In the most recent episode of the Internet History Podcast, I spoke to Jan about this famous campaign, how the strategy developed and the analytics and data that went into it. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of portions of our conversation. Click above to listen to the whole thing, or download it in iTunes here.

Brandt was been recruited to AOL in 1993 with a simple mission: grow the subscriber base. At the time, online services were a novel product. The majority of American homes didnt have computers yet, much less, computers with modems. Also, AOL was a distant 3rd or 4th in the online services market, behind CompuServe and Prodigy. So Brandt was given free reign to get creative with her marketing efforts. Prodigy was famously spending millions of dollars on flashy television ads. But Brandt was convinced that old-school, unsexy, direct marketing might be the key to standing out. After all, she needed to get people to try the service, and the only way to do that was to get the AOL installation discs in their hands.

We started packaging them [the installation discs] in boxes and tins and things like that. It was my absolute belief that you could not send someone a package in the mailand I dont mean an envelope, I mean a package that you could feeland not open it. I felt that it was constitutionally impossible for someone to get a small box in the mail and not be inspired to open it.

Armed with this belief, she phoned up her boss, AOL CEO Steve Case, and asked for money to experiment with a direct mail campaign. Case was skeptical, but gave her the go-ahead.

The campaign was going to cost $250,000 and that was our first campaign. It was a lot of money for us at the time. Steve teased me that it wasnt going to work. I mean, he has, you know, something of a dry wit. But he backed me completely. He backed me on that and he backed me on the next millions of dollars.

It turned out that the campaign exceeded her wildest expectations. In the direct marketing arena, a response rate of 2-3% for a campaign is considered a home run success. But Brandt was seeing response rates which were multiples of that.

Ive done a lot of first campaigns and launched a lot of products [...] I have never this was beyond imagination. [...] The overall response to that campaign was a staggering over 10% uptake. And remember, this isnt people who are saying, I think I want this. These are people who are taking the disc, putting it into the computer, signing up, and giving us a credit card. The top list, for that, I have never seen in my life beforeor sincewas a 20% response. It was stratospheric.

Originally posted here:
Those Free AOL CDs Were a Campaign for Web Domination. It Worked.