AdWorld Features

On the Pig’s Back

Michael Dwyer has been introducing brands to customers online a long time before digital marketing and online engagement became popular. He talks to John McGee about digital marketing and the challenges facing brands.

When Michael Dwyer came up with the idea trying to get companies interact with customers in an online environment nine years ago, many people thought he had taken leave of his senses. While it was the height of the dotcom era and internet start-ups were thick on the ground, only a handful of enlightened companies actually understood what he was trying to achieve. Thankfully, for Dwyer that has changed.

"I nearly couldn't believe the very positive way in which consumers reacted to brands on our site back in 2000. I knew we were onto something. Scale was the immediate challenge. That's where the marketing investment came in and by year 3 or 4 we had recruited enough members to shift the dial for any brand," he says.

"In the beginning there were two contrasting groupings. On the one hand, there were those who embraced it or got it and were passionate about it. They were great ambassadors and are still to this day. On the other hand, there were the doubters who said that they couldn't see how we make money so they didn't trust it or that we were another product of the dotcom boom and we wouldn't last. Then there were a few who actually didn't think the internet would actually catch on," says Dwyer.

Nine years later, it is Dwyer who is having the last laugh and many of the brash dotcom contemporaries at the time have fallen by the wayside. Despite a few bumps along the way, the company now boasts over 300,000 active members in Ireland and another 400,000 in the UK. That's 700,000 people interacting and engaging with a wide range of brands several times a week.

From the outset the company has pioneered a self-developed genre of marketing called empathy marketing. In a nutshell empathy marketing encourages users to engage with brands by choice through opt-in permission. The engagement is carefully managed, relevant to the customer and uses a softly softly approach when it comes to communicating.. In return users get a wide range of incentives like prizes, money-off vouchers and points which are awarded for purchases.

According to Dwyer, Pigsback.com earns its money from the brands that pay to have their products showcased while it also generates affiliate income from certain purchases made through the site. In other words it's a very sophisticated slick form of online advertising and marketing that ultimately leads to an engagement between the brand and the customer. The brand is happy to have sold some product and have a brand supporter, the customer is happy to have received a discount or a prize and Dwyer is happy to have facilitated the interaction. And not a CPM, CPC or CPA in sight!

Getting companies and brands to buy-in to the concept was a little tricky in the early days. "I suppose the other big challenge was inertia," he says " Believe it or not but a lot of marketing practitioners doubted the role Internet would play and a few still do. I don't know what planet they are living on. It's difficult for people to change their ways and to depart from the historic certainty of TVRs into a very uncertain and fragmented digital world. It was difficult for the early adopters to bring their organisations with them - their bosses and colleagues were stakeholders in the decision to do anything with Pigsback.com. The early adopters stuck their necks out and I will be eternally grateful to them. That was a brave thing to do and often met with scepticism and doubt, even in the face of very compelling results."

Brands that the company has worked with since its inception include Tesco, BT, Disney, Apple, John West, GAP, Nestle, MBNA, Guinness, Barclays, Weight Watchers, L'Oreal, Bailey's and 3 Mobile.

Apart from the standard advertising on the Pigsback.com site and newsletters, the company offers brands a range of other solutions like sponsorship, tailor-made microsites, coupons, product testing and sampling. Through a separate company called Empathy Marketing, and which is headed up by Angela Healy, it offers a range of consumer research services.

According to Dwyer, the importance of digital marketing for brands should never be underestimated. " "I think most brands no longer doubt the importance of online and know that it's a matter of time before it is the number one draw on their spend and on their time. All marketers are facing much tougher challenges than anything I remember, as they try to project their brands and businesses into a radically changed media environment. All bets are off. There are no certainties. A typical consumer's attention will be split between her laptop, phone, digital TV remote control -with a feverish enthusiasm for the fast forward button at the ad break- and there is and will be a growing resistance to consuming advertising content. So the integration of brands into content and environments that are more entertaining or possibly more rewarding will be critical," he says.

You could say that Pigsback.com was way ahead of its time. Now brands are falling over themselves in the scramble to get online and there is a seismic shift in the allocation of marketing budgets in favour of digital engagements.

"I think we were ahead of our time and that was sore financially in the first year or two, but we had no choice. We couldn't leave the space to someone else and needed to bide our time. But we are very excited about the prospects for digital and for our business as we enter our second decade. We have to keep evolving to stay relevant for brands and consumers but that's a challenge every business has. Thankfully, the brand and proposition have shown a certain staying power, so hopefully we'll be around for a while yet," says Dwyer.