Ashkan Karbasfrooshan's Ventures & Investments in Education, Business, Media & Entertainment

Pornography aside, men's magazines are saturating the newsstands these days. The libido-stoking formula of Maxim—girls in bikinis, bathroom humor, style tips, and more girls in bikinis—has by now been ripped off a hundred times over. Even the usually urbane GQ and just-launched Men's Vogue are dressing themselves down to nab a portion of the lad mag to beat's coveted 18-34 set.

When it comes to the print world, Maxim has clearly established itself as leader of the (rat) pack. But its relationship to online has been a bit more murky. In fact, it wasn't so long ago that Maxim Editor-in-Chief Keith Blanchard was declaring, in print, that the Internet was a dead medium, by publishing an editorial titled "The Internet Bites!", which ran in the magazine's February 2001 issue.

Well, not for the first time, one man's sow's ear became another man's silk purse. Just ask Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, Sales Manager at AskMen.com—the company that has become Maxim's fiercest online rival.

Karbasfrooshan and his cohorts at AskMen.com didn't buy what Blanchard was saying and found the E-i-C's comments in that editorial downright hypocritical since Maxim.com was still a functioning entity. So Karbasfrooshan did what any enterprising ad exec would do: he used Blanchard's own words against him, setting up the perfect sales pitch to Bacardi to show them why they were wasting their money on Maxim. Karbasfrooshan explains, "I photocopied and faxed [Blanchard's] letter to Bacardi's agency (Universal McCann) adding, ‘This is what this person says of online. This is where you're placing your ad dollars. That's the equivalent of eating in a restaurant where the chef is bragging about not washing his hands.' My President would even say, ‘Ash, are you crazy?' But lo and behold, we got the Bacardi deal shortly thereafter."

It's these types of brazen displays of faith in online marketing that helped propel Karbasfrooshan to the head of sales at AskMen.com, a Canadian portal that was the preeminent men's lifestyle site well before Blanchard delivered his internet eulogy. Started in 1999 by three college grads who, like thousands of other wide-eyed entrepreneurs, fancied the web a potential goldmine, AskMen.com quickly learned to take advantage of its Montreal home-base. "Being headquartered and founded out of Montreal, we weren't really privy to all that Silicon Valley hoopla, the dotcoms back in the era," says Karbasfrooshan, who joined the company nine months after its launch.

Good thing they weren't, since many of their startup competitors from the Valley (including Pseudo and TheMan.com) were dust after the bust. But AskMen.com weathered the storm thanks to practical, cost-effective planning. "We realized that it was going to get turbulent for a couple of years," Karbasfrooshan recalls. "But because we were based in Montreal and only had nine full-time employees in the first couple of years, we were able to keep costs relatively low. We just wanted to produce content that was useful and entertaining. Before we knew it, there was traction. People liked the site and there was a lot of feedback coming in. So in a way, we knew we were doing something right."

Within 13 months, the site was turning a profit, and AskMen.com's articles—which cover everything from health issues to entertainment to dating advice—were being featured on AOL and MSN. "That just destroyed our traffic numbers in that they doubled in a year," Karbasfrooshan says. "In terms of men's lifestyle, we were bigger than Maxim, FHM and everybody else. In fact, at some point, according to online audience measurement services, we were bigger than all of them combined."

It was during this period that Karbasfrooshan rose in the ranks of AskMen.com. A former financial specialist with Canadian meta-search engine Mamma, he first moved over to AskMen.com as a VP ("I went to school with the three founders," he explains). But while he toiled as a writer for the site, Karbasfrooshan quickly discovered his niche elsewhere. "With no ad sales experience, I started to sell for the company. Like 500K uniques, when the market was dry," he explains. "But through good service and hustling we became profitable shortly thereafter and traffic spiked quite a bit."

It's this hustle that has made AskMen.com a highly-coveted product. Recently, IGN acquired the company to add to its growing portfolio of male-oriented sites (which also includes film review staple Rotten Tomatoes). "They'd just filed to go public, so they thought having lifestyle in that trifecta would be pretty valuable," Karbasfrooshan explains. "For them, it was just to galvanize the18-34 segment."

IGN wasn't the only one buying what AskMen.com was selling. Visit them today and you come face to face (via banner ads) with the confidence that corporate advertisers like Bacardi, Axe Canada and ESPN have placed in the site—and in Karbasfrooshan himself. In the Axe deal, for example, Karbasfrooshan convinced the body-spray purveyor to rebrand itself specifically for his site. Thus Axe became "Axemen.com" for their banners that ran there, and the campaign has been a success.

Now that he's wrangled in big-league advertisers, Karbasfrooshan has proven himself enough of a pro to share his thoughts on how the online ad industry's shaping up. "Right now, one thing that is worrying me is that the internet is again a bit too sexy—in the sense that people are forgetting that things are cyclical," he tells us. "Radio isn't that boring, TV will always be cool, as well as billboards and print. Whenever I try to engage and listen to a client or agency, I think it's good to sometimes take a step back, away from the internet mindset, and say, ‘Hey, we live on a planet where we interact with other human beings and not just computers."'

But with major brands now in a mad dash to hurl their dollars online, Karbasfrooshan does admit, "a lot of these marketing and brand managers might be quickly moving online without doing their homework. They might just say, ‘I need to be on MSN or Yahoo!, because that's where it's hot.' They might not go deeper to see that you might get a better ROI on sites like AskMen.com because you don't need to compete with a million-dollar buy from GM." Karbasfrooshan adds that for publishers, understanding and innovation is needed to lure traditional advertisers and agencies to what is still essentially fertile space.

"We do need to be very courteous of the fact that these guys know their brand in and out," he states. "You can't go to them with just a standard proposal. You really have to bring brands to life online. Make them understand the thing that's exciting is not that it's hot and sexy; it's that there's no real playbook for internet marketing."

Ironically but not surprisingly, the malleable codes of the Internet have now compelled Maxim back to the space. But Karbasfrooshan doesn't feel threatened. "It's a good thing," he says. "It shows [the internet] is a worthwhile space. But it is obviously something that makes us redouble our efforts." And even though his site maintains the lead in overall traffic, Karbasfrooshan admits AskMen.com still feels like the underdog, which probably works best for them anyways.

"I don't go at home thinking that even though we're sitting at the top of the lifestyle content segment we should go on cruise control. I definitely feel like we are still the ones that have a lot to prove."

Keepin' it real, one word at a time... Kiran Aditham, kiran@pacemg.com

Info@Ashkan.ca