eSOLO Launches "One-Stop Shopping" for Marketing e-Services

Press Contact:
Vickie Welch
vickie@esolo.com
415-348-6092
Ben Shemano
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415-552-1515

eSOLO Launches "One-Stop Shopping" for Marketing e-Services
New Outsourcing Hub Helps Marketers Optimize Resources through Automation

SAN FRANCISCO, October 10, 2000 - eSOLO.com, Inc., the first B2B, outsourcing hub targeting marketers seeking to optimize resources through automation, today announced the launch of its new service. The centerpiece of the eSOLO offering is the largest index of marketing e-services ever compiled on the Internet-over 1300 Web-based services from nearly 700 application service providers (ASPs) of marketing applications-as well as a proprietary content platform of marketing action plans, or MAPs and a personalization tool called myRADAR. "The basic premise behind eSOLO is helping marketers find an electronic service to complete a marketing task," says Arthur Gutch, CEO and co-founder of the company. "That includes a host of business professionals, people employed as marketers, advertising personnel, public relations representatives, and a large base of independent agents." Gutch points to the lack of available marketing talent combined with shortened time-to-market brought about by the Internet economy as driving the need to optimize marketing resources through automation. "The Web is about getting the job done faster and more cost-efficiently without the legions of staff or huge budgets of yesterday, " said Gutch. "Surprisingly, in the marketing space-a traditionally huge cost center for companies of every size-until eSOLO, there wasn't a single source that directed marketers to online applications that could mitigate shrinking staffs and budgets." Lead by a team of sales and marketing professionals whose previous ventures include executive posts at AOL and Ziff-Davis, eSOLO's management team designed the offering to appeal to seasoned marketers and business owners who understand that outsourcing to electronic services is the way of the future. "This is wherein lies the value proposition for the providers of these electronic services," said Vickie Welch, chief marketing officer of eSOLO. "Users of eSOLO's service represent their best prospects and customers: web-savvy and tech-savvy decision-makers, who are early adopters, influencers, and repeat buyers, all aggregated in one place." eSOLO is counting on this premise to generate two of their primary revenue streams: lead generation and a portion of the transactions as a "pass-through" meta-mediary. In addition, eSOLO provides an attractive advertising vehicle for marketing services providers, offering them banners and sponsorships as well as enhanced listing opportunities in context with their specific service offering. eSOLO as a Meta-mediary What makes eSOLO's approach different than the familiar marketplace model is a unique task-matching system called e-matching which allows buyers to search eSOLO by marketing task in order to identify the e-services that perform these tasks, who the parent company is and what other e-services are provided by the company. Another unique eSOLO feature is that e-services, not companies are indexed. That way buyers can more quickly execute marketing tasks without having to navigate the entire site to find the appropriate e-service, especially in the case of large companies with multiple online applications. MAPs for Brain-storming and Building Marketing Plans Using a common methodology of functional hierarchies within the marketing environment, the eSOLO team compiled a system of comprehensive marketing road maps, called MAPs, to accomplish core marketing objectives. For example, if the objective is "Increase Sales Leads," a user is taken through a series of strategies that will accomplish that objective. These, in turn, are linked to a set of associated projects that have specific task sets tied to the e-services that execute them. For marketers, it's a brain-storming and strategizing tool; for business owners, they're "marketing cliff notes," helping them execute from objective through to task, quickly and easily. While eSOLO is free to both buyers and sellers of marketing e-services, only registered users have access to the e-service listings. e-Service providers not listed in the eSOLO index can add their e-service and company information to the index which eSOLO reviews and formats for uploading to the marketplace. When new e-services are added, the myRADAR feature automatically alerts registered users to the new e-service, installing it on their "radar screen" hosted on the eSOLO site. Another way users can find marketing e-services is through traditional search. This simply entails a user keying in a topic or task such as "online focus groups" or "send a release." eSOLO's search engine compiles a list of outsourcing options from companies that relate to the entry and presents the results to the search. Users can use the "sort" feature to view by price range, date added, special offers or user ratings. "There are a number of horizontal b2b intermediaries serving the needs of businesses from a cross-function perspective," said Gutch. "What makes eSOLO unique and represents the obvious 'value-add' for buyers of marketing e-services is the breadth and scope of the offering. That combined with the MAPs content allows eSOLO to sit above the market, as a meta-intermediary." According to Welch, this is indeed a front row seat, tapping into the marketing automation market, projected by The Aberdeen Group to hit $3B by 2003. "The Internet has changed everything for marketers. To rely on the old way instead of the 'e' way of marketing is playing with fire in an economy where time-to-market has been dramatically reduced. The de facto mentality is 24/7/365, with even toll-free numbers relegated to 'old-economy' status."
About eSOLO, Inc.
eSOLO is the first outsourcing hub for marketers who need to optimize their increasingly shrinking resources of time, budget and staff through automation. eSOLO provides these individuals, whether professional marketers or business owners responsible for the marketing function, with the most extensive index of marketing e-services ever compiled on the Web. Over 1300 online applications from nearly 700 service providers across 20 categories allow these individuals to outsource core marketing functions for greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness, realizing some of the $1.25 trillion Giga Information Systems projects U.S. businesses will save through e-services and out-sourced hosted applications by 2002. In addition, Forrester predicts that email marketing will be a $4.8B market by 2004 with $1.6B spent on outsourcing the acquisition of new customers.

eSOLO is a free service for both buyers and providers of marketing e-services. More information about eSOLO is available at www.esolo.com as well as registration details. eSOLO was founded in 1999, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, south of Market Street, in the heart of the Internet district.