Barry Judge from Best Buy
$1bcompany, branding, community, customer service, management
Have you ever wondered how the fortune 500 use direct response marketing? This week's interview is with the Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, Barry Judge (Fortune 500 rank: 72). Barry has a $500M annual advertising spend at his disposal. Most of their marketing online is direct response driven. But one of the really interesting things from the call was learning how they track and analyze everything within each store to find out what performs best - and everything is tracked back to overall demographics via your rewards card. Its working, since Best Buy is bringing in $35 billion annual revenue.Full Interview »
Joe Abrams from The Software Toolworks was the key investor in the company that built MySpace - Intermix. He's extremely low profile, and it was something of a miracle to get this interview. Joe's made it through two boom periods - in the 90's he ran Software Toolworks, which was sold for around $450M. And then he did it again with MySpace. One of his companies distributed Defender of the Crown, a breakthrough game on the Commodore Amiga, which I spent many years on when I was growing up. I hope his interview inspires you as much as it inspired me. This was my interview of the year!
This interview is with Brad Powers, CEO of Active Response Group in New York. ARG is an online lead generation company that owns and operates 400 different sites as well as runs its own banner network serving 4.5-6 billion impressions per month. It's an interesting mix of being both a lead generation company and a publisher I haven't come across before. One thing that sets ARG apart from many Internet companies is that it answers to a board of directors. Brad shares the importance of having mentors to help walk your company through financial, operational, and legal issues. His insight is helpful, especially if your company is growing very quickly - and these guys have had phenomenal growth.
This interview is with Ian Schafer, the CEO and founder of a New York City based full-service interactive marketing agency called Deep Focus. Ian talks about how he got the first major paid video advertising on YouTube. He explains how he gets deals set up with companies like MySpace, and how it is to run the Internet advertising for HBO, including TV shows like the Sopranos and (my favourite!) Entourage. Ian also gives us insight into his hiring process and how he selects senior managers.
This week’s interview is with Gary Swart, the CEO of oDesk. oDesk is like Elance except it’s primarily for programmers, and it incorporates a lot of tools to make working with programmers easier. I also spoke in depth with Gary about how to hire an experienced CEO – Gary was brought in to take over the management of oDesk.
