Backbone Media Wins The Ultimate Pitch" -- Savvy Software and Internet Companies Invest Their Limited Sales and Marketing Dollars in Search Engine Optimization

Backbone Media (www.backbonemedia.com) won The Ultimate Pitch" with a genuine" search engine optimization and positioning solution to a spurious" marketing problem. The Ultimate Pitch was part of an original program titled, Money Talks: Where should savvy software and Internet companies be investing their limited sales and marketing dollars?" The event was sponsored by The Massachusetts Software & Internet Council, which gave each member of an audience $100 million in play money and asked them to allocate it based on how convincing each of six speakers were. Greg Jarboe of Backbone Media received $1.062 billion marketing dollars to rank first.

WALTHAM, MA -- April 15, 2002 -- Backbone Media (www.backbonemedia.com) won The Ultimate Pitch" last week with a genuine" search engine optimization and positioning solution to a spurious" marketing problem. The Ultimate Pitch was part of an original program titled, Money Talks: Where should savvy software and Internet companies be investing their limited sales and marketing dollars?"

Sponsored by The Massachusetts Software & Internet Council (www.msicouncil.org), the standing-room-only event gave both council members and non-members a chance to really put your money where your mouth is" when it comes to marketing. Jeffrey Tarter, the editor and publisher of Soft*letter, told the audience to act like prospective clients from the Spurious Software Company."

Tarter, who has been twice named "Best Industry Analyst" by the Software Publishers Association, and is widely quoted in the business and trade press, said, Let's say that there are NO final versions of the software yet. Like many startups, we wrote our code first and only then decided we needed to think about marketing. Being utterly foolish, we've decided to invite in six marketing experts who will tell us what they think we should do with our marketing money."

Each member of the audience was given $100 million in play money from The .com Edition" of MONOPOLY® and asked to allocate it based on how convincing each speaker was. This created an incentive for the panelists to make a winning case."

The panelists included:
-- Greg Jarboe, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Backbone Media, who pitched Search Engine Optimization and Positioning: A Genuine Solution to a Spurious Problem."
-- Gwyn Thakur, Founder, Effective Marketing (www.effectivemarketinginc.com), who discussed The Changing Face of Face to Face."
-- Amanda Neal, Business Development Manager, iMakeNews (www.imakenews.com), who pitched Permission Marketing Campaigns."
-- Kimberly Jackson, Marketing Strategist, King Fish Media (www.kingfish-media.com), who pitched Private Media Marketing Solutions."
-- John Federman, President and CEO, Newmediary (www.newmediary.com), who pitched Getting the Business: Generating Valuable Leads."
-- Tony Sapienza, Principal Partner, Topaz Partners (www.topazpartners.com), who pitched Strategic Communications: Your 'Air Cover in the Battle for T&E Reporting Market Share and Mind Share."

While the votes were being tallied, Tarter presented the highlights of his latest benchmark survey on how software firms are actually spending their sales and marketing dollars. The complete benchmark survey, which breaks out sales and marketing cost ratios for companies focused on direct sales, reseller channels, Web site/e-commerce, or direct response, appears in the 3-31-02 issue of Soft*letter (www.softletter.com).

The winners of The Ultimate Pitch were:
-- Greg Jarboe of Backbone Media, who received $1.062 billion marketing dollars to rank first;
-- Amanda Jackson of iMakeNews, who received $663 million marketing dollars to rank second; and
-- Tony Sapienza of Topaz Partners, who received $550 million marketing dollars to rank third.

I remind you that we had a lot of marketing people in the audience," reminded Tarter. Most of them can't figure out how to make change for bus fare, much less deal with several different denominations of play money."

He noted, It's fascinating to see that the big winners in the shootout -- search engine optimization and e-mail newsletters -- are marketing tactics that have only been around for a few years. That's an indication of how much the Internet has begun to change the dynamics of technology marketing."

Tarter added, Of course, some things don't change, notably the naive belief that public relations -- which dates back to pre-human monkey screaming -- has any value at all. You'd think someone would notice that billions of PR dollars have gone down a rat hole, but apparently not."

Founded in 1996, Backbone Media (www.backbonemedia.com) is located in Waltham, MA. The firm specializes search engine optimization, e-mail marketing, and Web site promotion. Backbone Media has both business-to-business and business-to-consumer clients, including: A Hundred Monkeys (www.ahundredmonkeys.com), ETL SEMKO (www.etlsemko.com), International Poster Gallery (www.internationalposter.com), Netegrity (www.netegrity.com), Polaroid Corporation (www.polaroid.com), PressKits (www.presskits.com), and Rational Software (www.rational.com).

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