• Insurance payments mean they have to file with the insurance company, fill out various forms (online if they’re lucky, paper if not), and wait. After weeks (or perhaps a month or two) the insurance company will either reply with a check or perhaps some letter/e-mail explaining how the paperwork wasn’t coded quite right and they need to re-file. Once the check comes from the insurance company, though, it’s typically going to be for far less than the dentist bills, due to special rates the insurance company has negotiated/dictated for such a procedure. Usually a doctor will have to hire someone full-time to manage this whole process.
• The funds from check payments typically come in within 7 to 10 days, and in probably 90% of all cases the money shows up, no problem. There are those situations, though, where the check bounces for one reason or another, causing more time and paperwork for the office to collect. Once paid, the office receives 100% of the money, discounted indirectly by per-transaction banking fees.
• Credit card payments are charged and authorized before the patient walks out the door, and the money is in the doctor’s checking account the next day. Credit card merchant processors typically charge somewhere between 2% and 4% for this service.

Applying this understanding to my new dentist’s policy means my dentist has inferred that the best case is to wait weeks or months for — at best — 70% of the billable amount to arrive from the insurance company, all the while paying the salary of the person whose job it is to manage such things. Barring that, the next best option is to wait 7 to 10 days for 95% of the billable amount, paid via check direct from the patient. If none of those are an option, the dentist will begrudgingly get 96% of his money the next day.

Huh?

This policy (and there are many business which have adopted something similar) is based on the fact that the dentist sees that 2-4% from the credit card company and feels as though he needs to pass that cost through. In reality, the credit card payment costs him the least and nets him the most.

This is backwards. The business scenario isn’t that much different from what we deal with here at BackBeat Media. Instead of insurance companies, we have ad agencies. And while agencies don’t typically lower their rates after the fact, they do take quite a bit of handholding and red-tape-wading — and time — to get their bills paid. They always pay, mind you, and that’s the only reason we give them the terms we do (after all, if an ad agency didn’t pay their bills, they’d be out of business pretty quickly!). The rest of the companies we deal with, well, we pretty much guide them straight to the credit card path. It’s easy, it allows us to efficiently manage our cash flow, and there are zero collections costs. We pay our 2.5% and off we go.

If I could get every company to pay with a credit card, I would. And we pretty much do.

In any event, I am eager to discuss this my dentist, meaning — yes — I’m actually looking forward to my next appointment! I’ll report back if he has any wisdom I might have missed here. Until then, I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments below.

And, as it turns out, the former will be introduced by yours truly. I have spent the past few months working with the other members of the Ad Standards Committee crafting these, and it will be my honor and pleasure to introduce them for public comment.

So if you’ll be in town, come on down to ad:tech on Wednesday morning to hear about these two fantastic new developments. If you’re not, they’ll be publicly available for your review after the event. Either way, please take the time to digest what’s been created, and offer any comments you may have. We look forward to hearing what you think.

And while in the past I’d used Apple’s fantastic Migration Assistant to clone my old system onto my new one, this time I decided I’d better start from scratch. After all, the system that exists on my previous MacBook Pro had been Migrated and Upgraded since about Mac OS 10.2. That’s all the way back to a time when I was living in another state, running on a different CPU architecture, and was a significantly younger man. It’s possible I even had less children then, too. Suffice to say, it was time (time, perhaps, that I don’t have this week!).

So I manually migrated my documents and data over, and have been reinstalling apps one-by-one. Thus far, it’s actually gone MUCH smoother than I expected, and I’m now up and running “full-time” on the new box. There are still a few things I need to get in place, and I’m sure I’ll realize most of those while I’m traveling next week, but that’s the fun, isn’t it?

iMedia Conection published an article by Scott Medrum of HypeCouncil entitled, “Make the click worth their time” today that is absolutely fantastic. In it, Scott shows examples of good and bad banner design, and talks about including the “consumers as branding partners” throughout the experience.

Definitely worth a read — just be careful to scroll down on page 2 of the article. The “bad banner” examples he uses are *so* bad that you might think the article is over and ignore everything below them!

Go ahead… click. This one’s *definitely* worth your time!

Netscape’s IPO sent shockwaves through the industry, and really got “mainstream” investors focused on emerging tech in a way that was revolutionary for the market.

Then, of course, came the browser wars between Netscape and IE and, well, the rest is pretty well known. Netscape has been unable to regain any ground against IE, and instead says they’re going to work on making a Netscape “skin” for Firefox, perhaps as a nod to their faithful users.

In a way, I’m sad to see it go, but only because of what it represents in terms of the industry’s revolution. Business-wise, it has simply been around too long, and needs to be squashed. Good move, AOL.

Now a question for Time Warner: how long until you sell off AOL and get back to business?

But that hasn’t stopped you all from asking us about this. So I am going to share some semi-related information we have here in hopes that it stems this tide: The last day that BackBeat Media-brokered ads will appear on Think Secret is February 14th, 2008, and content will be posted on the site regularly at least until then.

You’re still free to call us and ask about this or anything else, but please know that the above constitutes everything we can share about the situation.

I recently learned that too much of this is NOT necessarily a good thing for business. Case in point: I recently decided to replace my aging day pack. It has served me well since I got it in middle school. Even though I don’t use it much these days, there are occasions where it’s handy to have a backpack to throw things in for daytrips, and mine has run its course. I received a gift card for L.L. Bean and figured I’d shop there. I found one that seems like it would work, and set to order, only to find out it wouldn’t ship until February 10th. I figured I’d order it and, if I found one in the meantime, I’d cancel. I also knew that L.L. Bean liberally employs the Scotty Principle in their shipping estimates.

The pack will arrive today: two weeks after I ordered it, and well ahead of their (still) estimated February 10th ship date.

I can appreciate buying yourself time to make the customer happy, but had I not been aware of L.L. Bean’s overly-late estimates, I likely would not have ordered from them.

The trick is to promise your customer something reasonable and expected, and then beat that.

The Mac Observer sees a layout refresh, changing the location of the columns, moving the content up and to the left, and allowing room for some more modern ad types. Comments thus far are relatively positive, with perhaps some additional tweaks required to make the forums perfect. All in all, I’m very pleased with this new look!

Deals On The Web has images now! They’re everywhere, including the headlines view, the summaries view, the deal details, and the RSS feed. It’s so refreshing to see these there. We’ve needed them for a long time, and Stephen Swift really delivered on this one. We’re very fortunate to have him on board.

Tomorrow has me traveling out west again. This time it’s a little different than most. I have a gig with Fling tomorrow morning at the UNH homecoming game here in Durham, New Hampshire. Then I head to Boston and get on a plane for San Jose, CA where I’ll be playing that night with Paul Kent and his Silicon Valley Houserockers, celebrating Paul’s birthday. Looks to be an interesting day, for sure! My flight is on Jet Blue, which means no “real” meal service, so I’m a little concerned about that, but… I’ll manage. Sunday I get to hang out and relax with Paul, his family, and some friends, then Monday a meeting in Cupertino before getting on the redeye home. If you need me to focus on something, Tuesday might not be the best day to call.

Lastly, I hadn’t reported in since we set up the new BackBeat Media office in Austin last week. Things went splendidly and the office *really* came together nicely. Jeff and Toni seem quite comfortable there, and we’re looking for big things to come. Nice work, everyone!

I think that’s it. More from the road, perhaps, and certainly more once I’m back in the office next week.