I have no personal interest in the Zappos RFP like I did with the Current TV one, but Mike Wolfsohn of Ignited does.
He says Zappos didn’t spend much time with his agency’s response:
We submitted our response online in the form of a blog. It gave us the opportunity to have lots of contributors posting text, pictures and videos, and the ability to use meta tags and navigation that made our response easy to explore. But just as importantly, it allowed us to see how much time Zappos spent reviewing our proposal.
There was but one significant problem with our approach: Zappos wasn’t willing to spend the time required to examine the content of our proposal.
According to Google Analytics, Zappos viewed only 5 of the 25 pages on our blog, with an average page-view time of 14 seconds. Considering that each page corresponded to a question they asked in their RFP, one would hope the content would prove valuable in their evaluation process.
But they never clicked on the page that introduced them, as they requested, to the members of the team that would service their account. They never clicked on the page that described how we stay at the forefront of marketing and technology. They never clicked on the video testimonial from the founder of another e-commerce company that we helped increase sales by more than 200 percent. And they never clicked on the page that outlined our approach to measurement. Which may explain why they didn’t know we’d be monitoring how much time they spent looking at our proposal.
The entire post is worth reading. I love how Ignited Minds used analytics to prove how little the client paid attention. Clients are demanding analytics of all types these days from the work their agencies do. It’s good to see the tables can be turned.
[UPDATE:] You can read a response to this situation from Aaron Magness of Zappos in the comments section of this Ad Contrarian post.