IAC Quarterly Call
IAC/InterActiveCorp Q4 2005 Earnings Conference Call Transcript (IACI) | InternetStockBlog.com
Summarize from the Diller himself:
Personally I think Lending Tree is a great property. Check out that awareness stat!
Lending Tree has 83% awareness among consumers. We’re going to increase marketing and we’re going to drive the acceptance of online adoption just as we’ve done in so many other categories. Online mortgage activity is a tiny fraction of the trillion of mortgage activity that goes on in this country.
We’d heard in 2005 from IAC rumors that the butler was going away, or there was going to be some major branding shift. That branding change for Ask Jeeves will happen in Q1:
Later this quarter, we’re going to relaunch Ask’s brand. We’ll continue to innovate around differentiating our core search with features and tools that people actually use. If you’re watching television, you’ll soon begin to see, hear and I think emotionally understand our new message.
Wall Street loves to hear stuff like this - big sales force growth coming.
Q2, we’re going to hugely grow our sales force. Given our enormous audience, we’ve simply got to accelerate the number of merchants in our system as fast as we can.
More info on the rebranding. Specifically, a date: February 27th.
t. I do think that search traffic, search queries are going to grow. That’s the essential purpose that under lied buying Ask. We believe that the fight for growth is a damned good one. It’s going to take us time; it’s not going to happen overnight. But you’ll see February 27th a so-to-speak relaunch of Ask and I think you’ll see about a week, 10 days after that, a very large media push; the purpose of which is to get people to use the product because we believe that if people use the product that they’re going to say, we think this is better.
Finally, go to the site and read the last question. It’s an interesting answer about the balance between monetization and user experience on Ask Jeeves in terms of the # of paid links should appear in search results.