MarketingZoom Launches Site For Buying And Selling Marketing

From the MarketingZoom site

A new website, launching in a public beta this week, believes that marketers need better ways to find targets and resources.

Called MarketingZoom, the Portland, Oregon-based company is the brainchild of president/founder Tony Scott. He also runs a motor sports marketing agency in the Portland area called Drive Motorsports International, which represents race car drivers, corporate marketers, and sponsors.

“We were stuck with the caveman solution of cold calls and sending proposals” to find sponsors or publicize the races, he told me, so MarketingZoom is his attempt to get beyond that Stone Age.

In its launch announcement, MarketingZoom said its evolution derived from trying to answer one question:

“If I was a small local business, what options do I have to market my business in my area?

The site allows users to set up a profile as either a Company, an Opportunity, or an Agency, and to define the opportunities sought or the possibilities offered.

A billboard company wanting to fill its billboard spaces, for instance, might describe the kinds and numbers of people advertisers can reach, or a racing car looking for sponsors might indicate its requirements. Scott said this should cut down on members receiving wildly inappropriate proposals.

Any member can utilize a long list of filters to search on the site for the Company, Opportunity, or Agency that fills their needs. To communicate, members can message to site inboxes or employ instant messages, and deals can be proposed via PDF attachments and taken from there.

A local pizza shop, for instance, might look for marketing opportunities using the “under $10,000” option, and find out about an available sponsorship for a local children’s baseball team.

Since it’s just online this week, the site currently has only about 70 registrants. There’s no fee to join or participate. Scott said some subscription fee for additional features was in the works, once his company got a sense of how people are using the site.

But the site’s own marketing may be a stretch. MarketingZoom describes itself as “a social marketplace platform,” although the key socialnesses are the inbox messaging and the IMs. It also calls itself “the first online marketplace for the marketing and advertising industry,” although antecedents include Traction, Shocase, The Media Ant, AgencySpotter, and others.