In his new SoHo office, with its gleaming hardwood floors, Scott Heiferman remains a Net idealist. The 25-year-old CEO of i-traffic considers himself part of a Web crusade for relevant content. In his apartment in 1995, Scott began helping advertisers find smart ways to spend their money on the Web. Now, as an established buyer of online ads, he's turning banners into targeted shopping opportunities and taking on bigger-name clients. So I asked him: "Don't Net purists fear commercialization will drown out content?"
"Well, I am an Internet purist," Scott tells me a bit testily. "In the first place, if the Internet turns into a big Times Square plastered with ads, nobody wins." He says his company believes in targeting ads so precisely that Web surfers see only messages relevant to them. Search engines are a perfect example of targeted ads; i-traffic was one of the first agencies to sponsor keywords, delivering banners that match search results. If you go to a search engine looking for the band Luna, you might get an offer to buy their new CD.
In the second place, Scott says, he believes in his product. After all, he's not exactly hawking $25 bottles of holy water or "hot investment opportunities" through mass email dumps. His clients include CDNow, Disney, Duracell, and BellSouth. As he puts it, "We don't work for shitty companies. It's all in the name of good stuff."
There are a lot of new clients seeking i-traffic's services since their first feature in Dream Jobs a year ago, and the staff has doubled in size, from 16 to 32 employees. Advertising Age estimates that i-traffic has handled between US$15 million to $20 million in online buying for BellSouth, Disney, and CDNow in the past 12 months. While that's a pittance in other media, online it's still a good haul. The company just moved into its new SoHo space, "near better restaurants." It's a neighborhood suitable for scoring free lunches from visiting ad reps. And since founding i-traffic, Scott's brought on two partners to help run it - media director Pete Meluso and COO Ed Dintrone - that Scott says lend "senior experience" to the office.
Although i-traffic sometimes looks and acts like a Web advertising agency, they don't actually have anyone on staff to develop and build the creative product - no designers, no production managers, no copywriters. Banners are designed by a contractor. Now i-traffic is looking for the rough equivalent of a creative director.
The right person for the job might have agency experience or a background in industrial or retail design. On the other hand, the perfect candidate might be someone who's designed promotions in a department store.
You'll have some freedom to develop a creative plan and grow your staff if need be. For example, if you're convinced ads are better made in-house, you might hire yourself a design department. Depending on experience, the low end of the pay range starts at $50,000, and Scott says stock is also a big bonus. Employees own 95 percent of the company.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the job is the title, which shows that i-traffic still has a sense of humor. Taura Null, who found i-traffic a year ago through Dream Jobs and works as targeting technologies specialist, insists that the company is still young and nutty. "The new office has given the company a more staid feel," she admits. "But there was a new guy who came to work every day in a tie. Finally someone said, 'What are you doing, man?'"
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
