Logo collaboration... almost done

We've gotten the revised submissions. We've got a favorite and want to first hear what you have to say. See the top eleven here as well as the unrevised finalists further down that page. What do you think?

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Roundup on liberal network efforts

The total is in. Blogads donated by the Advertise Liberally network raised $181,548.73 for the Red Cross's Katrina relief efforts. Hats off to Kari Chisholm who ground out the technical details to make it happen and Chris Bowers who mobilized the network to run the ads. Social-network geeks can add this effort to the chapter on speed of light grassroots mobilization. I should also mention that John Hawkins pulled his conservative network into donating ads for MercyCorp; unfortunately, no tally was kept for total contributions and the pitch did not specifically address conservatives.

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Go Fug your WSJ

The WSJ put Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks, aka www.gofugyourself.com, front and center yesterday.

The pair decided to share their opinions with friends on a blog as a way to blow off steam from their day jobs at "Growing Up Gotti" and "America's Next Top Model." They registered for a free Internet account, lifted photos from a variety of Web sites and started posting reviews.

A few ground rules quickly evolved. Only famous people would be featured, and comments would be restricted to clothing and appearance. Bad language and graphic commentary on things like bras and underwear were fine. Most of all, the two women wanted to focus on what stars wore to events at which they knew they would be seen and photographed.

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Audi A3 camboomo!

Shankar Gupta, reporting for MediaPost on a panal at OMMA East yesterday, listened closely and heard something shocking:

Brian Clark, the CEO of GMD Studios, recounted a campaign that his agency ran for Audi, titled "The Art of the Heist." Just one-half of one percent of the media buy budget, Clark said, was spent on BlogAds--a firm run by panel moderator Henry Copeland, which sells ad space on some of the highest-trafficked blogs. Those ads, Clark said, ended up accounting for 29 percent of the traffic sent to the campaign's landing page.

For folks who aren't reading the ad trade press, that was a giant eight-figure campaign and much ballyhooed, so this is a particularly astonishing number. Brian said that this weird "hand-made" ad, shot with a Treo phone, worked particularly well and led to a re-alignment of the creative direction of the campaign.

Update I should note that the A3 campaign won a bunch of Mixx awards on Wednesday night. If you go to day 10 of this timeline, you'll read that "The media cost for the entire blog ad buy was less than the cost of one banner ad on a mainstream site such as Yahoo. The blog ad appeared on sites such as metafilter, lockergnome and dailykos." Tie it all together: thanks to some stunning creative and savvy choice of blogs, 29% of the campaign's traffic was driven for the cost of a banner on Yahoo.

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Pavlov's pup

Parenting tip:

Children receive all response -- shouting and hitting as well as kind words and hugs -- as affirmation of the behavior that elicits it, so you can best shape the result you want not primarily with negative interventions like punishing misconduct but by using praise and other rewards to reinforce behavior that replaces it.

Posted by: henrycopeland on Sep 28, 05 | 11:31 am | Profile

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Notes from OMMA

I'm at OMMA East, in a gloriously sparkling September sun. I heard Steve Rubel, of Cooper Katz PR, say "I don't read Ad Age anymore, I read Steve Hall's Adrants." And I heard Wenda Harris Millard Chief Sales Officer of Yahoo say:

If you look at the rise of the blogs, at first it sounded like a horror movie then it turns out to be a really phenomenal expression of self. It is a phenomena that marketers really need to understand and wrestle with."

And floating randomly in the crowd, someone said in all seriousness, "I invented the community space, you know Friendster, Myspace, that stuff."

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hunting in the morning, blogging in the afternoon

Karl Marx may have been a lousy futurist, but he'd be a decent new media analyst...

The various stages of development in the division of labor are just so many different forms of ownership, i.e. the existing stage in the division of labor determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labor.... As soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic....

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Logo-a-go-go

Sorry to shift back and forth, but to consolidate comments and thinking on one page, I've put the final piece of news over on the logo manifesto page. If you are interested in the logo collaboration, go there.

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Logo finalists

OK, a stage we didn't anticipate, a list of finalists. Just too many interesting ideas and executions to grapple with. But also the realization that the comments contain many vital insights. (I for one loved Carm Hodzic's Typewriter until I realized that it did strongly echo those tiny RSS tags.)

So I've published nine logos for us to focus on. Each seems minutely improvable in its own way, either in colors or emphasis or readability. If the creators would like to submit an amendment or two, this would be welcome. Write me and I'll send you the appropriate URL.

As you can see, my colleagues and I selected logos that are predominantly simple and rough-hewn. Viktor's "see logo live" functionality pushed us hard in this direction. And, to make biases clear, we've leaned unlitteral, avoiding illustrations of writing, typing and speaking. Some of the finalists invoke those acts, but none portray them.

The comments so far provide good insights about how logos might improve. In this go round, the only comments we'll publish will be focused on "how to improve this logo." I hope creative criticism will push us to perfection.

I am very grateful to all the people who created a logo that is not in this list. There's a treasure trove of creativity here. It will make a fascinating dig for some design archeologist in 100 years. I hope you like what you see and will continue to contribute ideas and support our collaboration.

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Newspaper implosion

As a newspaper reader, I'm saddened, but as a prognosticator, I have to ask: why has it taken this long? From the WSJ:

Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine says Federated Department Stores Inc., a big newspaper advertiser, has started to shift spending from newspapers to direct mail and electronic media, such as television. Two early forecasts predict a small increase in holiday retail sales this year, as spending could be hurt by high gasoline prices, lingering effects of Hurricane Katrina and a lackluster job market.

Movie studios, long a mainstay advertiser, have been cutting back, as well. Through July, motion-picture advertising in the top 60 newspaper markets was down 9.3%, compared with the same period a year ago, according to TNS Media Intelligence, an ad-tracking service.

Ad revenue accounts for about three-fourths of total revenue for newspaper publishers. As a result, even small changes in ad revenue can produce big changes to the bottom line.

The twin blows to retail and movie ads are sapping third-quarter results for newspapers across the industry. "I keep referring to it as carnage," Ms. Fine said. "All we've done for the last week and a half is lower [earnings] estimates."

And she doesn't mention the soon-to-vanish real-estate ads or the impact of the coming recession. At 50,000 bloggers need to become self-sufficient fast to fill the hole left when the newspaper industry spontaneously combusts.

Some prior thoughts on the financial viability of the newspaper industry.

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New wine in old skins...

I had some fun bashing the idea of "consumer generated media," the current catch-all for blogs, podcasts and forums -- in this MediaPost column today.

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Random links

Taegan Goddard launches a traffic drive.

Alexander Graham Bell's original patent for the telephone was titled an Improvement in Telegraphy, which brings to mind Mark 2:21: “No-one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost and so are the skins.”

Matt Welch listens to the world's greatest deliberative body... mumble, stutter and drool.

Rereading Cluetrain yesterday, I noticed for the first time thesis #15: "In just a few more years, the current homogenized 'voice' of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court." The corporate "we" is dead. Long live you and me.

Bill meets Napoleon.

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Logo short-list

To help us focus, we've narrowed the list of potential logos down to 30. We're very grateful for all the submissions. There were lots of other fantastic ideas, some arguably better than what you see here. This is just the list of logos that we think might fit (with some shrinking or streching) our format and philosophy. Don't wait until we've picked one to say, "Gee that looks just like XYZ's logo." Tell us now, please!

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Blogads and TV

In this morning's MediaPost, Shankar Gupta does a great round up of the surge in TV blogads.

Lauren Prestileo, the national publicist for PBS's "American Experience" series--which has featured biographies of RFK, Castro, and Kinsey--said BlogAds offered a cheap way to target ads to politically-minded consumers for public broadcasting.

For example, BlogAds displayed 12 million impressions for the PBS Boston affiliate's documentary about Kinsey, which aired in February. "That's amazing exposure right there," she said. "To get 12 million impressions with print would be very, very expensive, and it would be a much less targeted audience."

"We don't have a ton of resources, obviously," she added. "There aren't a lot of places where you can spend $1,500--or up to $5,000--and get that much exposure and to such a targeted audience. Online advertising in some regards can be prohibitively expensive, at least when you're dealing with public programming and non-profits." ...

Richard Turner, the senior vice president of interactive marketing at TBS, said that the high return on investment, and the ability to reach the coveted "influencers," is what attracted Turner to the proposition of advertising on blogs. "They tend to be an efficient media buy," he said. "They are effective at reaching opinion leaders, or at least opinionated people." TBS generally combined promotion on blogs with rich media ads and search marketing, Turner said.

Jessica Smith, a publicist for interactive media at PBS' "Frontline/World," agreed that the appeal of blog advertising for her show was the audience that it allowed her to target--people who already show an enthusiasm for the type of program she was hawking. "Blog readers are the kind of people who are interested in current events and news, but they're also interested in people," she said. "That's what we do with Frontline/World--it's personal stories from around the world."

Another datapoint in this trend is AVP, whose initial trickle of ads turned into a gusher as the volleyball season progressed.

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Blogs in Senate hearings, Prairy Home and Google

How many of you heard Senator John Cornyn (R TX) quoting the Volokh Conspiracy in questioning John Roberts?

Well, I happened to be looking at my computer last night, and one of the blogs, and it's always frightening to see — to put your name in a search and look at the ways it's mentioned. I suggest you don't do that, if you haven't, until this hearing is over, because this hearing is a subject of a lot of activity and interest in the blogosphere.

One of these blogs said that your comparison of a judge to a baseball umpire reminded him of an old story...

That was Cornyn's first question. Want your message to be seen by at least one Senator? Start here.

I heard Garrison Keilor recommending catsup's "natural soothing agents" this weekend to sooth bloggers' frayed nerves, then read about this spat he's having with a blogger.

Funnily enough if you search Google for "Google Blog Search" you won't find its new service unless you look in the ads on the right.

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100%

All our meters are back up at full-throttle, so it looks like the ride is over. Thank you to those of you who were patient... and thank you to those of you who weren't patient. We'll be making good two days tomorrow for advertisers.

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Out of the woods

It's been 48 hours since we screwed up DNS and, bingo, our metering is taking a big pop, up 20% in the last hour. I'll try to grab an image of it a little later.

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Server update

Here's what we've been able to piece together. The correct DNS is slowly disseminating through the many tiers/branches of domain registries stacked around the globe. In some cases, the servers update every 2 hours, in some cases every 48 hours, and in some cases longer (a week?) We've tried a bunch of tricks and tactics to speed things up yesterday and are continuing today. As far as we can tell, 85% of blog readers can now see the adstrips/ads and Blogads.com. That's up from 60% at the low. (One datapoint is that ad purchases have not slacked off, though I still can't see Blogads.com from my home computer.) In theory, we should see another improvement today (assuming there are more servers out there with 48-hour caches than we'd originally anticipated). But, theory doesn't buy lunch, so we're continuing to look for ways to manually speed the process along. If you have suggestions, we'd love to hear them. I'm very frustrated and apologize. We'll be issuing make-goods to all advertisers.

In part, this error and a couple of other recent stumbles may be a sign that our Budapest team is overstretched. As a company we tend to try to have more balls in the air than hands. That's great and keeps you motivated and driving, but when you slip up, it's ugly. Driving to normalize slightly, we added an additional programmer a month ago and he's pulled into the swing very quickly. Now we've moving towards hiring another strong coder.

For numbers geeks, I don't know if you can make sense of this graph of one of our server's bandwidth consumption, but if you compare like time periods, we're doing roughly 15% better today than yesterday.

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More logos published

I've just published the logos that came in during the initial "private submission" phase of our logo collaboration. There are some interesting logos that should not be overlooked. Head over and leave your comments if they catch your eye. Here's one by Greg Stobb. And a bunch by Stephanie Kloss, particularly this one. Finally, there's this bunch by Mikel Browning, including this and this.

Since we ended up with more logos than we anticipated and a wider variety of comments, we're considering creating a shortlist and inviting public comment on that list. OK idea?

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Our stupid domain error

We screwed up our domain name registry entry yesterday afternoon, which means we made our servers' addresses invisible to much of the Internet. A stupid human error which should not have occured. I went home last night thinking everything would be ok in 30 minutes, and didn't blog about the problem because I was unable to access the blog server myself. The error propagated very quickly, but the correction has taken longer to spread. (As my colleague noted, bad news travels faster than good news. ) We are seeing the correct DNS slowly propagate (judging from our bandwidth metering and spot checks) and know that a growing number of people can view blogads. We're guessing that by noon 90% of the Internet will be able to see blogads. I apologize for the problem and will pass along more information if I learn anything new.

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150 logos public

I'd hoped for perhaps 100 logos. So far, we've had a total of 281 logos submitted, 150 of which are now here.

We're hugely pleased with the quality of contributions. A friendly designer had suggested that we'd only get 1 great submission for every 50 (something about the second standard deviation), but I think that roughly one in five are fantastic. I'm also happy about the level and quality of public involvement. We've had roughly 120 comments so far; in a number of cases, designers have taken advantage of feedback and tweaked their designs; some generous designers are offering each other tips.

Submissions close on September 9. You can wait until everything is public, or head over now to comment while designers still have time to incorporate your suggestions.

Some staff favorites: Oneshape, talking logo, Tangerine Garage, Chalkboard Garage, hodgepodge, Rip Torn (not the actor). Beyond these, there are a number of brilliant designs... the trick is trying to picture how the design would fit on our site AND on t-shirts and bumperstickers. There are a number of other great logos in the "unpublished" category -- these will be uncovered once submissions close.

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Let 10,000 flowers bloom

We spent the weekend hiking in Western NC. The weather was perfect -- 75 and low humidity. And the wildflowers were... wild. We waded through what seemed like hundreds of different species. Beneath rocks in the torrent way up near Pot Cove Gap we found a few giant salamanders and cray fish. How do they manage to get that high?

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Jarvis: take the ad?

Jeff Jarvis asks his readers whether he should accept a blogad for a t-shirt bashing FEMA. So far, his readers say no, 9 to 0.

Chug Roberts, who has Blogads running in many corners of the blogosphere for his publications, suggests that advertisers donate space to relief efforts. He's been replacing his own ads with appeals for the Salvation Army.

Rogers Cadenhead is catching some flak for mooting the idea that liberals and conservatives stage a friendly competition to raise money for Katrina relief. FWIW, I've heard this suggestion from people on both sides of the aisle and thought it was a good idea, though the various efforts have diverged at this point and a horse race would be difficult. Having said that, I'm waiting to hear from the folks who work with MercyCorps to talk about separate landing pages for various networks, including John Hawkin's conservative network, who are already running MercyCorps ads.

At this point, the liberal network has raised $157,000 for Katrina relief.

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Image server problems...

We're having trouble right now with the servers at Voxel.net that host our images. We're trying to get things straightened out. I apologize for the problems. If you are an advertiser, we'll be crediting you a day. If you are a blogger, the easiest approach is defering your currently running ads until this freak storm passes. Again, I'm very sorry for the problem.

Update 5.15 I called Voxel 30 minutes ago and heard that I'd be getting an answer shortly. I guess shortly might be longly. The good news, at least until Tuesday morning, is that as folks go home for the long weekend, bandwidth consumption is dropping off so our load balancing is doing a more adequate job. At this point, though Voxel's problems continue, everyone's adstrips should be working Ok. If not, please drop us a line.

Update 6.30 Tracked down someone Voxel and he was super helpful. We'll have the problem solved tomorrow morning.

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4.5% of blog posts mentioning Katrina

At least that is what this graph shows.

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Logo participation tweaking...

We've spent the morning playing with the UI of the logo contest. Cleaned up the navigation a little and added a logo with most comments page and recent comments page. We've seen a couple of instances in which a logo has gotten a comment and then the designer has created a new version building on the feedback -- maybe the new pages will accelerate discussion and collaboration. (My wife agrees with Jeff Jarvis, BTW.)

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DIY advertising

Tessa Wegert spots a key trend that I've been jawing about at conferences... DIY advertising, which is quietly transforming advertising. Wegert focuses on the word of mouth angle, but her point also applies to advertising purchase and distribution models. Just as blogging upends publishing, tools like Google Adwords, Blogads and Adbrite make it simple for advertisers to place their own ads. We're doing to the ad industry what Dell did to computer sales and distribution.

As Wegert says, all is not lost for media buyers. But the game is changing:

In many ways, online media has become a self-service communications channel. Advertisers, even those with little online experience, are discovering what consumers have known for years: at its core, the Internet is a medium "for the people." It doesn't necessitate assistance from the pros. One can develop ad creative using a home software program, launch a site using inexpensive Web design and hosting tools, and promote one's initiative with blogs, discussion boards, and good old word of mouth -- all without traditional advertising agencies, media brokers, or placements experts.

Where does that leave media buyers, whose livelihoods depend on the demand for ad placement expertise? There's no denying the need for evolution. Today's buyers and planners must prove their worth by showing versatility and demonstrating expertise in new formats to makes themselves indispensable. Though it's certainly possible to work without media buyers, they possess a knowledge of the Internet space and its users that professional and amateur advertisers alike would be remiss not to exploit. Having access to DIY online advertising is one thing. Making it work is quite another.

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Katrina relief and the blogosphere(s)

A bunch of bloggers have written asking about coordinating the donation of ads for Katrina relief. While an individual blogger can always give an ad with his/her own "offer code," some bloggers are trying to coordinate a larger effort. For example, last night the liberal blogger network donated a bunch of ad space for money that will go to the Red Cross, thanks to the efforts of Kari Chisholm and Chris Bowers.

Update: John Hawkins Right Wing News spearheaded conservative blogad sellers in donating an ad to MercyCorp.

Amid lots of other juggling, I'm working on similar stuff with other networks. Some folks have mooted the idea of having a friendly competition to make things happen.

And NZ Bear has a round up of blogger charity efforts.

Update As of 6.22PM Thursday, the Liberal network's ads have raised $58,920.80.

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