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Always Racing

Posted on: Wednesday, 31 May 2006, 09:00 CDT

By Leon Stafford, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

May 28--Many people assume that Scott Preacher, at 6 feet 9, would be all about basketball.

But people who know Preacher, vice president and managing partner of the Atlanta office of interactive marketing agency Avenue A/Razorfish, know he'd rather squeeze his sizable frame into a race car than run down a hoops court.

"I have been an adrenaline freak since I was a baby," said Preacher, 34, who played high school basketball and occasionally hits the court today. "But my passion is racing. I spend a tremendous amount of time on racetracks in the U.S. and in Europe."

Luckily, one of Avenue A/Razorfish's top clients is German carmaker Mercedes-Benz and its high-performance AMG division. Avenue A designed the Web site, www.mercedes-amg.com, for the AMG brand, recently winning a Webby -- the Oscar of the online marketing world -- for the effort.

"It's a great example of what we can do in interactive marketing," said Preacher, whose office also works with Coca-Cola, Federal Express and BellSouth.

"We just didn't build it to be cool. It's totally functional. It delivers what the client expects, what consumers expect."

Meeting expectations has kept Preacher gainfully employed in the highly volatile Internet world. He's worked at some of the biggest technology companies, including Answerthink, USWeb/CKS and iXL.

While most people in the Web business have had periods of unemployment -- especially after the dot-com bubble burst in late 1999 and early 2000 -- Preacher has stayed one step ahead of layoffs.

"I was always able to manage the business well through very difficult times," he said.

Preacher attributes his success in part to a willingness to take his time making decisions and, sometimes, to avoiding the traditional route.

Instead of going to college immediately after high school, Preacher took time to work on and sell offshore motorboats.

Eventually, he went to Georgia State University and earned a degree in communications. But he was swayed to technology after an internship with accounting giant Arthur Andersen.

After college, he stayed at Andersen for three years.

But when the workday is over, it is racing -- after his family, of course -- that makes him the happiest, he said.

He owns AMGs and drives them on racetracks and drag strips in the Atlanta area. He's a fan of German touring car and Formula One racing and spends hours online late at night checking the results of races.

Last January, he went to Lapland, Sweden, with 30 other AMG owners for four days of "ice racing" on tracks near the Arctic Circle. "I loved it," he said. "It was a lot of fun."

QUESTION: So what is interactive marketing?

ANSWER: What we do is help companies either talk to their customers or sell products to their customers through the Web. In some cases we advertise to people through the Web, so the Web becomes the commonality between all the different types of services that we offer. Everything we focus on we consider Web-based. What we don't do, which unfortunately is how many people think of us, is spam and the pop-up ads you see. We don't do those things.

Q: Can you provide an example of how interactive marketing works?

A: The AMG brand of Mercedes came to us and said, 'We want to create an emotional connection between our customers or our potential customers and our brand online.' Which at first blush sounds simple. But when you start to think about the connection people have with their automobiles, it is a very, very strong bond.

It's one that is usually created by the way that you look at an automobile, the way you touch it, the way you feel in it, the way you hear it. Those types of things. Which, when you look at a flat, 12-inch diagonal screen, is a tough one to overcome.

So in this instance we create a Web-based setting that captures that passionate experience the best that we can online by showing customers what they want to know, like what the engineer who designed the engine was thinking when he designed it. We can show it being tested and under what conditions. The customer dictates what they are interested in, and they're able to look at that information at a much deeper level than they would through a normal interaction.

Q: How do you gauge your success?

A: We are measuring the amount of time visitors spend on the site. We're measuring what they do while they're on the site and what types of features and functionality that they are investigating. The site also changes based on those things as well, so it's a continuous cycle of improvement. And as we see different areas that are more important to consumers, we add additional content to those areas.

Q: What is the future for the interactive advertising community?

A: When the Internet bubble crashed, there was a backlash from all the businesses that were really supporting and driving it. And then just mentioning the word interactive in the boardroom could have gotten you fired on the spot because companies had spent so much money on interactive and didn't feel that they got the benefits from it. So I think we did go through a period between 2002 and 2004 where spending went from in the millions to 'Just keep our site online and don't touch it.'

The difference now is that the Web has matured. I mean, we understand the space, the technology has really matured so that a lot of the things that we wanted to be able to do four years ago, we're now able to do. And a lot of organizations have improved their own IT organizations so that now we can support the kind of Web applications that we need to [in order] to truly make it beneficial.

Q: So what's it like to win a Webby?

A: Usually awards are won by wild sites that have cool and different things, so... this is exciting for us. We felt kind of vindicated and rewarded with the Webby for a site that meets all our goals. We certainly love to win awards and that is great, but to be honest it's all about the customers and the value that the customers are getting.

-----

To see more of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.ajc.com.

Copyright (c) 2006, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

DCX, AQNT, KO, FDX, BLS,

Source: The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

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