THS Articles

Radio Advertising: Music to Hurricane Electric’s Ears

By Irwin Soonachan

When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose. In early 1999, Benny Ng was ready to take a few chances. He had just been named marketing director for Hurricane Electric (www.he.com), a Silicon Valley-based hosting outfit with a 12-person staff operating out of a budget-sized 2,000 sq. ft. office/data center.

The good news: Silicon Valley was at its bacchanalian peak, with so much money flowing into its smog-ridden gills that every local assumed their piece of the pie would arrive post haste. The bad news was that Hurricane Electric was one of the very, very few companies in the area not seriously pursuing venture capital. The local competition included national, capital-flush giants who were marketing like it was ... 1999.

Without the capital to open the velvet rope via traditional methods, Ng (pronounced “ing”) did the only thing he could: Try every technique possible to get Hurricane Electric in front of customers.

“We wrote all the options down on a sheet of paper,” Ng says. “You’ve got print, direct mail, TV, radio, etc. All the ones we could do financially at the time, we tested. Obviously, we did small tests. If something worked, we started throwing a little more money into it.”

After firing off a few rounds of all the budget-friendly marketing devices they could think of, Ng and co. turned to one of the un-hippest, old-economy advertising outlets in existence.

On paper, radio made sense. Radio ads were (and remain) very inexpensive. Arbitron, the radio ratings firm, estimates the average daily round trip commute time in the United States at 54 minutes long, and traffic congestion in Silicon Valley and the greater San Francisco Bay Area probably forces motorists to spend even more time in their cars.

Moreover, since the Silicon Valley economy is driven by the tech industry, a fair percentage of listeners understood the technical aspects of the ads, which featured one character complaining about poor web hosting and another recommending Hurricane Electric, mentioning entry-level pricing, bandwidth, and the strength of its network.

“I’m sure some of the content was a bit over the heads of some of the listeners, but our target knew what our ads were saying,” says Ng.

Suddenly, Hurricane Electric was hot. The 2,000 sq. ft. suite was expanded by an additional 2,000 sq. feet. Ng wanted to saturate the market on a low budget, so he only ran ads Tuesdays through Thursdays, and took advantage of packaged deals to grab a few inexpensive weekend spots.

When the tech bubble burst and debt-rich competitors began to disappear, many of the Bay Area enterprises left stranded without a hosting provider turned to Hurricane Electric. Within a couple years, in the midst of Silicon Valley’s worst recession in 25 years, Hurricane Electric expanded to nearly 50,000 sq. feet of floor space.

“We had people signing up for service listing radio and the stations they heard us on (when asked how they found out about Hurricane Electric),” Ng says. “We had sales calls, and they would mention our ads to us. We would have random meetings with other people in the industry, and one of the first things they would say is how they noticed our ad on the radio. And when I met with friends or went to the mall, people would come up to me and ask if I worked at he.net, and say that they had heard our spot on the radio. We were getting great reach, and frequency.”

Not everything Ng tried was successful. After the initial success with radio in the San Francisco Bay Area, Hurricane Electric explored other markets but couldn’t find the right city.

“We looked in L.A. and we looked in New York, but the prices were a lot higher than we had hoped for,” Ng says. “Then we started looking in smaller markets such as Seattle and Arizona, but those markets were just too small.”

Ads on local television missed the mark as well. “We saw better results doing radio,” says Ng.

Today, Hurricane Electric is taking a break from radio advertising after nearly six years, focusing instead on managing the rapid operational growth they credit, in part – along with a great sales team and strong support – to their radio ads.

“I can’t say that all of it is accredited to the radio ads; we have great salespeople and other good marketing. But when we were with salespeople from different organizations, prospective clients, hiring new employees, they’d literally walk in the door and say, ‘Hey, I heard you on the radio the other day.’”

Hurricane Electric still advertises in the normal trade venues frequented by their competitors, and see a return to radio on their horizon.

Their success promoting Web hosting on the radio might be a phenomenon unique to their region – a place where techies per capita is higher than anywhere else in the United States and radio ads are affordable. The real lesson of Hurricane Electric is that by looking into opportunities the competition ignored, and by being willing to devote small portions of its marketing budget to experiment with new venues, they identified a company-making opportunity.

“Radio was one of the things that a lot of other companies were doing, but not hosting companies, and actually, not that many technology companies,” Ng says. “We thought it was worth at least a test to see if radio ads were a worthwhile investment.”

For Benny Ng and Hurricane Electric, the only way to find out was to try.

About the Author:
Irwin Soonachan is Strategic Content Manager for Mercury Interactive, a technology company in Mountain View, Calif., providing software to optimize the quality and performance of enterprise applications to customers worldwide.