From the time I led the Marketing Services Team at Demon. It was a dumb sounding advert, but it pulled response like crazy. Some of the responses contained nice poems, so it struck a connection. Average cost to land a £10/month paying customer was £30, around 1/6 that of competitive ISPs at the time (this was 1998-9). Advert done in a rush a week before, and Les Hewitt (media buyer extraordinaire) got it in most target newspapers near the back. Once in, he phoned them hourly to twist their arm relentlessly, getting it shifted page by page towards the front. Made it to the dating page on Valentines Day in the Times I believe.
We tested everything, and knew what the landed cost of a customer was for every ad we placed. Even knew which ones gave us high response and then heavy churn 3 months later (waves hello to the Sun and Mirror). The most effective medium one of my folks tried gave us acquisition costs of £4 per landed customer, but many odd ball complaints. But that’s another story.
Class work, well executed and full of personality. In my humble opinion, of course.
