"It has been my observation that great leadership can have an electrifying effect on the performance of any corporation" David Ogilvy

The iNDemand online buy for their Howard Stern vod product is live. The text ad in B&C's email (issue preview) directs traffic here. The big missed opportunities here..."Send to a Friend" lacks function...a mouse-over reads "Coming Soon". The "I Want Howard" page should work but lacks the data population required to search by zip...the end result is the user is asked to "please call your local cable operator" while also failing to capture any contact info, engage the potential customer or direct the viewer to their Register page and form. Perhaps they are logging the zip requests to help their sales team talk to the MSO community about demand but I would not bet on it. Poor design, half-baked effort; the good news...they can fix the pages with some thought and minimum effort. They should employ two creative approaches...one for the MSO (the target of their B&C buy) and one for consumers, the pages now up fall short, they suffer from a lack of focus and message discipline.

Howard Stern on demand website fails to demand

In my experience the best sites...

Encourage you to share news - make it easy to tell a friend (exactly what the Send to a Friend feature should now be doing)

Always directs you to another page - no dead end pages (the I Want Howard search may create dead end pages)

Encourage you to provide contact info (e.g., email) to get the conversation started (the Register page needs to get major attention, much more play - they should offer unique can't buy it premiums in a sweepstakes - Meet Howard or Howard autographed swag, free month, cool downloads or bonus content et al to prompt word of mouth and drive sign-up)

Provide a clear and simple way to buy the product or service as part of your first visit.

The iNDemand Howard Stern pages fail in these critical measures. Very cool idea - ripe with potential, very poor execution.