@SXSWi Interview: Jim Coudal on What We Talk About When We Talk About Maintaining Dignity in Online Advertising

I noticed on the Deck Network site you have the term cost-per-influence as opposed to the standard CPM [Cost per (thousand) impressions]. Do you pay attention to analytics? Do you give that data to advertisers?

Generally speaking, we have very little data to give them. We have gross impressions. Basically that's the only data we have to give them. At Coudal Partners, we buy advertising quite a bit for our various other brands, and we know without a shadow of a doubt that the only click-through statistics that we trust at all are our own. So for us to build some whiz-bang model that counts clicks and redirects the ads and makes everything more complicated in order to provide information for advertisers that they're not gonna trust seems ludicrous to us. It's the simplest thing in the world for an advertiser to slap a Google Analytics tag or some other such tag on their ad and find out exactly how many click-throughs they got from a campaign. So we don't provide very much of that sort of stuff at all. We did do a big reader survey last year - a very funny reader survey - and we have some general information about our audience in terms of how old they are and what they do for a living … and if they were to have a super power, what super power it would be … and what kind of things they own, and how they feel about their lives and all that, but all sort of silly and straight forward. So we do have a little bit of demographic information. We aren't called to share that very much, and I think it's pretty obvious who we're reaching when you look at the sites involved. We did the survey as much for our own curiosity as we did for anything else. We try to keep it pretty lo-fi.

With The Deck, you guys are targeting a very specific demographic: creative types,  writers, designers, and the like. In terms of this sort of model working across the internet, do you see it as feasible for other specialized groups to be doing this sort of thing?

The answer to part of the question is absolutely. If there is a specific interest group of people that is reading a particular group of websites, and if there are appropriate and logical advertisers who are trying to reach those people, then absolutely. I think that model could work in many different sort of vertical fields. But in terms of a broad, general way, I don't have any idea. I mean, I think the advantage of The Deck in some ways is the fact that we - the people who are running the Deck - are the very same people who are reading The Deck sites. We can make qualified and intelligent decisions about which advertisers are truly relevant to our audience and which brands, services and products we respect, and we can allow those ads to appear in The Deck. It's sort of implied endorsement. Now can we decide which weight loss program is the most appropriate, or could we decide which mortgage refinance sham artist is the most appropriate one? I don't know. I think for particular interest groups you certainly could see a Deck for foodies or a Deck for motorcycle lovers. It doesn't seem so ludicrous that the idea could work in other places. But we haven't seen it very much. The only place it seems to be working at all is in people who've ripped off our idea … but it doesn't seem to be working as well for them as it is for us, either.

You're obviously very particular about who you work with, with The Deck Network and also with your agency in general. You use the term well-vetted on the Deck site. That's not something I see on most ad network sites… 

Yes. In The Deck, it goes both ways. It's not only that we're careful what ads we accept; we're as careful - or more careful - about what sites we bring in. We're making ads that we're proud to carry on our own site, and we're making the kinds of ads we would buy for our products. And we're also readers. So we're making the kinds of ads that we don't mind seeing. We've sort of got all three seats at the table. We're a publisher and an advertiser and a consumer. We're not trying to pull one over on anybody. We're trying to provide a service to advertisers, to provide income to publishers that we like, and to provide information to consumers. We didn't invent anything new. It's just a matter of stripping away all the crap, really.

I wanted to ask you for some advice for designers - you know, the people who want your job … How did you get to the point where you are now, only taking on projects for clients you really want to work for? I assume you don't just wake up one day and it's happened…

It didn't. It wasn't always that way. It was sort of a gradual process. We were pretty much a conventional design and advertising consultancy. We were doing lots of high profile work for restaurant groups and entertainment companies and sports companies, and a lot of naming and identity work for banks and financial service companies and brochures and outdoor billboards and tv commercials, blah blah blah. We were just going along the way those companies go along, taking the work as it came, getting bigger and chasing more work to pay for the increasing overhead … not really stepping back to see if we were actually creating a company that we liked. Then things conspired against us, and we lost a couple of pieces of business for reasons that weren't our own - just from the natural course of the economy or consolidation. We had a moment where we had to decide: did we want to continue to chase projects that had us do work we weren't proud of, for people we didn't like, or was there another way? So we added up our liabilities and our assets, and we had this website Coudal.com that thousands of people were coming to every day. That was an asset. We decided we would start to try to create services and products that could replace the clients that we would eventually stop taking work for. It was a slow process. I think it took us almost two years to get back where we were, providing 50 percent of the studio's revenue through our own projects as opposed to through work for hire. But the second half went much faster. Jewelboxing led to The Show, which indirectly led to Fieldnotes, which led to The Deck and Layer Tennis, and now we don't have any clients. So I think there is a bit of a leap involved, and you have to obviously pay the rent and pay for tuition and mortgages. You've gotta do what you've gotta do to make money, but I think that, at least in our case, if every decision we made was based on a real question about whether we want this to be the sort of thing we do, if you ask that question every time you take a job, eventually you're gonna answer, no. And then you're gonna have to deal with it. You're gonna have to tell somebody no and then go find something else. But if you stop asking it, you'll never get there.

(For more on this subject, check out this interview on Design Glut, here)