Christopher Petix

Company: Clash-Media

With over 15 years of experience in the online marketing space, Christopher Petix is a long-standing member of the industry, with a history of establishing new offices: “My niche has very much been getting new companies or new divisions off the ground,” he commented. “My work at Vendare Media, Startravel.com, Coreg Media and now Clash-Media has all been starting up new offices for organizations headquartered elsewhere. I brought Vendare and Coreg over from the West Coast and Clash is an international company that wanted to set up in the US.

“My role within the company has been to first establish the business in new markets, but I also specialize in launching new products – building them out and taking them to market. What I have learned is to not get carried away and throw too many products at the market. At Clash we have established one area of the business, made it sustainable, given it the right management to run it long term and then moved on to the next thing.”

What are your main services?
We have four core services: Lead Generation, Revenue Path, Email Marketing and the latest is our Call Center Service.

Lead Generation and Email Marketing are the cornerstones of our organization. We have brought innovation to these traditional services with the way we do things, but have then built upon them with new, fully complementary services.

Our Revenue Path is unique. We have a highly flexible way for any website owner to monetize traffic through their website – and it doesn't just have to be registration traffic, which is where a lot of the traditional revenue comes from. We have an approach that gets  publishers an effective CPM and also does not disrupt the user experience – so the traffic gets through the offer set and onto the destination page.

Our Contact Center Service is our latest edition – and I tell you, the quality of data you get through doing this is phenomenal. This way of getting marketing data on potential customers is going to seriously grow because the information is just that good.

What makes your firm different from others in the industry?
I think Clash is unique because we have such a wide range of skills. Our core services deliver as a full circle deal – we have advertisers, designers, sales specialists, traffic experts, analysts and campaign managers. When advertisers or publishers come to us, they don't need to farm parts of the campaign out to other people...we can do it all.

More importantly, we can adapt to changes in the environment very well. We have regular strategy meets to help keep us ahead of the curve. We also have a really clued in team that makes things happen. The industry we're in moves so fast that if you can't be flexible and adapt quickly, you get left behind. You can't be in product development for six months, because the needs change by the time you come to launch. We feel that our flexibility is another unique feature of Clash.

Tell us more about your firm's success story.
Clash-Media is a relatively young company, but within that time we've exceeded revenue and growth targets. We're even beating targets set in this economically restricted market and growing on a monthly basis. The success is because we have focused on getting really good at one service and then building another one. We have a lot of repeat customers that we have been able to sell our new services to because they have confidence in our ability to deliver great ROI.

What are the most important questions a potential customer should ask a company before choosing a vendor like you?
There are several important questions that marketeers should ask – but they should also be aware of the questions that a vendor should ask them as well. A vendor should learn as much as they can about a potential client – where the campaign needs to get to, what the overall goals are, how previous campaigns went and ideal situations that the client wants to be in.

The first important thing for potential customers to ask is: “Do you understand my company?”

Other questions include:

- “How will you monitor and run my campaign?”
If a vendor doesn't have a team behind its campaigns, it will be a slow starter and not able to adapt quickly enough to any changes, either external or internal. So it's important that a vendor has the manpower and expertise to really deliver on a campaign.

- “Will you help us analyze what we're doing?”
Too many marketeers don't analyze their campaign's performance properly. It's an essential element in optimizing ROI, so potential customers should find out how their vendor will do this.

What are some of the myths in your field?
Lead generation and co-registration got such a bad reputation years ago, because some cowboy operators saw a quick buck and essentially ripped marketeers off. Offers were presented poorly, opt-in was non-existent and low-quality leads were generated. This resulted in too many marketeers being burned back in the day because they were fed information on users who had no idea what they were 'opting in' to.

Because of this, I would say that the greatest myth about lead generation is that it doesn't work. There have been so many developments in measurability that it's harder for these questionable outfits to continue operating.

How do you develop your skills in this continuously changing environment?
Continuous professional development is essential and something that I strongly believe in; there's no time to stand still, because the world will pass you by. I attend a wide range of events and conferences where a variety of professionals from within the lead gen and marketing industries talk about the latest things that they're doing or seeing.

But also, because I have been in the industry for so long, I have built up a lot of contacts. This gives me the opportunity to get together with a lot of other players and work through a lot of different things – challenges, lead gen techniques, new technologies. Working within the industry in this way helps me and Clash to stay at the front of the crowd when it comes to pushing the industry forwards.

What do you see as the future of the industry? What will be the challenges?
The future of the industry will be driven by quality. Marketeers are increasingly savvy about exactly what they want from a campaign and how to get it. They want high quality – that means accurate data, recently collected and that's relevant to their specific product and organization.

We've just had some pretty significant challenges: the slow growth economy and shrinking budgets. There will be more to come though, the greatest of which is convincing the market at large that Online Lead Generation can deliver the performance-driven type of campaign that marketeers are striving for. Getting web publishers, for example, to realize that they can make money without affecting the user-experience of their site's traffic is an on-going initiative.

We are ready for the challenge and welcome new ones. Online Lead Generation cannot – and for us, does not – work on a long-term contract basis. Our everyday challenge is to keep delivering high quality, otherwise we lose our clients! We want to keep our clients for a long time, but on a succession of short-term deals. The “churn-and-burn” guys gave the industry a bad rep – while some of them may still be around, those days are over!

...do you anticipate any drastic changes?
Drastic changes tend to sneak up on you. We keep our finger on the pulse at Clash, so we can see some of the big changes developing, but we may all be hit with something new tomorrow! Email inboxes are becoming more and more guarded – it's hard to get into them. We're developing a white-listing model that will overcome several of these difficulties, and we believe this approach will be standard within a couple of years. More drastic change will follow though – soon we will be looking at double-opt-ins as a basic level of regulatory compliance, like in Germany. Those guys are out in front in terms of their laws – but it's something that we have some expertise in because we run international campaigns and have offices throughout Europe.

Where do you see Clash-Media in 5 years?
I see Clash-Media as becoming the biggest Online Lead Generation and Revenue Path partnership provider – because of the way that we do things, oriented to our clients. Right now we've only scratched the surface of the market share that we can win – so we want to continue that. We will continue to innovate with new products and services that keep us ahead of the curve and our customers generating big ROI.

I can also see Clash operating in yet more countries – adding to the seven countries in the US and Europe with some presence in the APAC region.

And you personally?
I can see myself running this organization. Clash is going towards some great places and I want to take the company there. I think I'll still be faced with new challenges in this industry, which is what I thrive on – so I plan to still be here! Maybe spending a bit more time in our box at the Yankees!