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On January 4, 1999, four "Click the Dice" radio
spots for a five year-old IT job board debuted in Boston,
Atlanta, Denver, Seattle and on Rush Limbaugh nationwide.

Eighteen months, 22 markets, five radio networks,
and 11 cablenets later, Dice's job listings had grown from 70,000 to
243,000; weekly clicks were up from 125,000 to 1.5 million; and 128,000 extra IT
pros had landed new jobs - earning recruiters an extra $1.2 billion in commissions. Dice.com's revenues surged from $14 to $40 million.
What massive global agency consortium engineered
that spectacular ad campaign? Actually, my business manager Thursday
Savage and I pulled it off pretty much on our own.
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The media planning applied many of the
testing, tracking and rollout techniques outlined in The
Basics of Direct Response Radio. We used Scarborough data to
identify the top 10 to 12 "IT cume" stations in any market, then
Added P1 Cumes to achieve
broad reach and frequency against target. A typical 10-15 day flight
produced immediate surges in local traffic, job views, resume uploads...and
easily three to five months of drag.
Our
ability to predict response helped Dice's sales force in Des Moines pre-sell hundreds
of subscriptions to local recruiters and HR managers. The
pay-as-you-go radio media
budget became a profit center!
I also refined and perfected my Real People Radio interviewing & editing
techniques to produce over 40 Multiple Selling
Proposition testimonial spots. The key objectives were first to defuse the
emotional reluctance of many engineers to seek higher paying jobs and
then to
encourage IT pros to use the site to manage their careers, i.e. to determine
the market value of learning another programming language or
skill.
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After a year of spot and network radio, we added
cable TV including two campaigns for
dice's New York parent company, EarthWeb a portal for 20 or so IT sites and
e-zines. We had just begun a Sales Training
Program when
the aftershock of the
Dot Bust bankrupted EarthWeb.
Management consolidated all EW and Dice advertising at Hill
Holliday, part of a massive global agency consortium. Six months after
EW shut down our campaign, Dice had
eased back to 28,750 job listings and under $7 million in gross
revenues. In early 2003, Dice folded, then remerged under new
management, and in 2006 sold for $200 million or thereabouts.
I
personally do not speak or write C++, Perl, Sed, Awk or Grep. I have no clue
what a LAN Manager or Systems Engineer really does. Despite my lack of relevant experience,
though, I did guide Dice into the #2 spot in the entire IT job category, second
only to Monster, which outspent us 20:1.
What cluttered category do you compete in?
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[.wma files]
Atlanta Intro
Job Deluge Denver
Job Search Boston
Announce Availability Seattle
Forrest P is on Vibrate
Olivia v The Pharaohs
Chris P Lands at Cisco
Monica D Got 150 Offers
John B's Cell Phone Bill
These Girls Are Geeks
Luke & Meg On Top
Chris S Doubles his Pay
What Are the Hot IT Trends?
Josette adds PMI to MSCE
Meg Flies to NYC
Ralph P Recruits in Chi
Jack K Recruits in Iselin NJ
These PMs Use Dice Daily
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