IdeaPro.com

Since the late 1970's the founders of IdeaPro.com have been developing and managing advertising campaigns for hundreds of clients.

The campaigns ranged from television and radio, to newspapers, magazines, direct-mail, and billboard outdoor advertising. Our clients included retail merchants, shopping centers, casino's, banks, car dealers, attorneys, physicians, discount stores, restaurants, plumbers, dry cleaners, flower shops, hair stylists and barbers, and many more.

During the high technology boom of the late 1980's, we began to concentrate on computer manufacturers and other high technology companies. By the early 1990's, we were handling millions of dollars per year in national magazine retail advertising for about two dozen growing computer manufacturers. All of these magazine ads were designed to generate telephone or mail orders for the companies' computers, using their toll free 800 numbers. The name for this kind of sales became known as "the direct channel" as opposed to the retail or wholesale channels of sales. If you were reading about computers in those years, you saw our ads in leading U.S. magazines such as Computer Shopper, PC Magazine, Windows, PC Sources and others.

Over the decade from the mid-1980's to mid-1990's our direct channel advertising had generated for our clients well over a billion dollars in telephone sales of computers and computer parts.

When the Internet was born, it was only natural that we began to move our direct channel marketing and advertising efforts for high-tech clients away from magazines and onto the 'net. 

During 1994 and 1995, we began working on developing commercial web-sites for some of our advertising clients. In those early days, taking credit card information across the Internet was not only uncommon, it was actually banned by many leading banks. The 'net was considered purely an email media or information media, and sometimes an advertising media. It was almost never thought to be a platform for buying or selling products and services. Today of course, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the Internet boasts a total of almost 25% of all business-to-business B2B sales, and roughly 3% of all retail consumer sales in the United States. Sales volume online is growing at about 30% per year. Total eCommerce in 2006 may top $1 Trillion dollars ― that's over $1,000,000,000,000.00. Some sources report that it may even be double that, including all non-reported services and direct-sales of products advertised online.

Our early online stores were based on Selena Sol's Web Store, which was the leading edge eCommerce software in the world at the time. The Web Store CGI shopping cart code was written in Perl and based on the open source licensing model. We were among a few hundred early developers and contributors to the software. In 1996, one of our early stores Americal.com was popularized as a leading-edge eCommerce example of Web Store development. A screenshot image of Americal.com was featured on page 2 of the book "CGI for Commerce", by Selena Sol and Gunther Birznieks. If you're a programmer or web-site developer, you may want to download this large 400-page book free in PDF form, at Extropia.com.

In our first several years, we designed, programmed and built many dozens of online web stores and informational commercial web-sites. Today, we concentrate on our core business; web based advertising and marketing.

Real World Experience

IdeaPro.com was founded in January, 1997. From the very first days of the Internet, we were focused on the virtual community of this 'world without borders or walls'. We were founded by people who had a strong foundation in science and engineering, as well as many years of experience in producing advertising for retail clients in the real 'brick and mortar' world.

In the world of small to medium retail business, there is little room for pretending or false ad-claims. If an ad campaign doesn't work, the client knows it right away… sales decrease. The retail advertising agent lives by the sales from last week's sales events.

Lower sales produce lower budgets, and that means lower ad agent commissions. No room for pretending there. If your ads don't work, you change them and you change them fast! You change the ad copy, you change the media, you re-target to different audiences. But if your ads do work, you win and you win fast — not next year, but next week.

Budgets increase and agent incomes follow the retailer-client's profits. If the client makes money, the ad-agent prospers. If not, the advertising agents starve.

Why is that important to the Internet Marketer? Because only local retail advertising could prepare advertising people for today's instant success or failure 'net marketing. There is no hiding a successful campaign. Now you know in minutes what local retailers used to have to wait days, weeks or even months to find out… does the ad work?

IdeaPro.com is dedicated to helping you improve your online marketing and advertising. We hope you enjoy reading articles gleaned from 30 years of experience in producing — ads that sell!