Citron's Losing His Marketing Mojo
Vonage's post-IPO troubles must be weighing heavily on the shoulders of chairman and co-founder Jeff Citron. For the second time in two weeks, he gave a keynote at a conference that lacked any kind of sizzle. Brian Ward said Citron's speech at Convergence 2.0 failed to address any of the issues facing Vonage these days (growing criticism about its marketing spending, class-action lawsuits, discounts for subscribers who threaten to leave, etc.). With Vonage under siege, this is a time when you'd expect a marketing-wizard such as Citron to creatively and enthusiastically come to the company's defense. After all, he co-founded Vonage because he believed VoIP would be a disruptive technology. What happened to that chutzpah? Now that Vonage is public, itseems like Citron believes he has to behave. But if all you're going to do is give tepid keynotes with no meat, why bother talking at all because you end up doing more harm than good? One other thing, Citron declined to answer questions after his keynote. Strange because it's not like he's not good at avoiding questions he can't answer.
June 27th, 2006 at 11:54 pm
I wouldn't answer any questions either, if I were him. The way he used “pre-marketing” EBITDA was desperate. Essentially, he was saying that this would be how much we would earned if we had not done marketing. Marketing is Vonage's single biggest outflow and to treat it as it wasn't an operational expense is pitiful.
All you have to do, is look at the left side bar on this blog =) to realize where all that marketing money is going!
BTW Mark, do you think there's any good reason why new subscriber-based businesses like to focus on pre-marketing EBITDA earnings figures? I'm still trying to get my head around that.
June 28th, 2006 at 11:10 am
This is no big deal. I have been using this same deal for 6 months from Voicestick.com
Great for when the cell phone is not practical and I have wireless. SOme places where you travel they want a zillion bucks to use a cell phone, or worse there is no signal (crazy places like San Diego!)
But most hotels I stay in have wireless.
A limited market for sure, but handy.
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