|
Archives: November 2005
Blogs in the news
It was great to see two of our smartest advertisers mentioned in the New York Times this weekend.
First, B.L. Ochman's genius blog treasure hunt for Budget Renta Car got good coverage from Stuart Elliott in the Times. Some great metrics and good mention for blogads sellers BuzzMachine, Jossip, Largehearted Boy, Overheard in New York, Stereogum, The Superficial, Blurbomat, CityRag, Coolfer, Daily Heights, DCist, Gothamist, IndieWire and This Is Broken. Turns out Blogads handled all but two of the blogs Budget advertised on. (I was disappointed that Budget and its agency failed to give Ochman and her partner in crime Komra Moriko credit for generating the idea and driving all the creative.) You can see the various ads and clickthrus www.upyourbudget.com/ads
Then Brian Clark's Audi A3 Heist blogads got a nice mention in a scattershot story about the commercialization of the blogosphere.
Audi, for example, paid for about 70 million ads about its A3 compact model on 286 Web logs in the spring. Many of the blog ads featured links to other blogs that mentioned Audi's campaign for the A3, not to Audi's site, said Brian Clark, chief executive of GMD Studios, an experimental media firm that worked with Audi's advertising agency to create the campaign.(Odd that Blogads, which handled 283 of the 286 blogs Audi advertised on, didn't get mentioned while weird affiliate deals on marginal blogs did get highlighted. But you can't win them all.)
"It was a substantial buy, and it was a really effective buy for the campaign in terms of the response," Mr. Clark said. "You find that blogs are these series of citational records of what bloggers read. People with blogs read blogs. You get a feedback cycle."
Web logs also give advertisers the chance to aim at specific readers. If you want to advertise to New York Mets fans, for example, you can easily find blogs that cater to those readers, Mr. Clark said.
| link
Happy Thanksgivingish thoughts
Ken Layne, one of my favorite Internets users, grinds out some great headlines in this week's Sploid:
Pope bans musicals and apple martinis: Anybody who supports 'gay culture' unwelcome in the priesthood
Pardoned turkeys flying first class to Disney: Hunger kills 6M children a year
Secretsanta.com, Idaho: Another idiot town sells its naming rights to another stupid website
Sam, world's ugliest dog, dead at 14
| link
The personal relationship
Cathy at Cityrag urges her readerse to consider advertising blogs.
Blogs are an incredibly powerful media outlet. Most are visited daily (or several times a day) by extremely loyal readers who absorb every word and image on the site. Blog readers feel a close and often personal relationship with the sites on their daily "hit list".
| link
Bloggers get press exemption from the FEC
Read Krempasky who has been the claxon on this issue for the last 18 months. Full speed ahead to November '06.
| link
Upyourbudget (without TV)
Shankar Gupta pounces on the Upyourbudget story and extracts the money quote: the whole campaign cost less than a single 30 second TV spot. More from his article:
Scott Deaver, Budget's chief marketing officer, said the entire contest and promotion--including the $160,000 in prize money--cost less than a single 30-second spot on a highly rated TV show. According to BlogAd's tracking numbers, the campaign, as of Thursday night, recorded 19.9 million impressions on 125 different blogs, garnering 56,446 clicks at a cost of roughly 25 cents per click. The campaign kicked off Oct. 24, and will end today. The ads ran on major, big-name blogs like Gothamist.com, CityRag.com, and Metafiler.com, as well as smaller-name blogs like TheDailyWTF.com, TonyPierce.com, and YouAintNoPicasso.com. "That was the point, to try some grassroots stuff and try some of the smaller blogs. We wanted to reach a really broad population," said [B.L.] Ochman. No matter what blog you're looking at, if it's consistently reaching its audience, it probably has some loyal following there."
| link
Fall days
The hot weather, weird and impudent for November, finally broke and now we've got 50 degree air so unhumid and clear it feels vacuum packed.
We walked along the Eno River this weekend, jumping from rock to rock and trying to catch leaves.
Last night, I did a little copy editing on Zsofi's translation of five pages of answers her parents had given to a child's questions about their lives, particularly during WWII. I'd heard most of the stories before... a deadpan recitation of bombs missing by feet, aunts and uncles who died marching to camps, children sharing documents to avoid deportation, listening to tank cannons, hunger.
When I'd finished, Zsofi said she wanted to get back on the computer to work on Toad Talk, the school newsletter she edits. Struck by the absurdity of the juxtaposition, we both started laughing. And then we were crying.
| link
Sweet redesign
Gearing up for a huge 2006, Taegan Goddard has redesigned Political Wire. The redesign compliments the design of DailyKos -- as my colleague Miklos used to say when we were newspapering together: "two's a trend!"
| link
Upyourbudget blogad clickthru metrics
If you visit this page on Upyourbudget.com, you can see various iterations of UpyourBudget's blogads along with the accompanying clickthrus. Start at the bottom to see the oldest blogad first and you'll see an astonishing 10-fold improvement in the clickthrus between ad #1 and ad #4... going from 0.05% to 0.52%.
Zeeowee!
Seeking to promote Budget Renta Car's blog-only sixteen city treasure hunt over the last four weeks, B.L. Ochman and Komra Moriko have been relentless in experimenting and bold in pushing the envelope. They have seen each innovation amply rewarded. More importantly, they've been having fun and it shows. A brief recap of their innovations:
#1: cool image, not much text to ensnare the reader
#2: elusive photo, more text, including four links to blogs
#3: pseudo video image (vaguely sexual?) and nine links (all to sections of upyourbudget site)
#4: more video-ism, more mystery, lose the quotation marks and capitalization, twelve links!
The vision is perfect for the link-rich, attitude-packed, p2p, narrative mosh-pit that is the blogosphere. The ads build on a creative foundation laid by Richard Turner and Seth Miller at Turner Broadcast (here and here), Farah Miller and Stephanie at Knopf (here and here), Brian Clark and Justice Mitchell (here and here) and Beth Kirsch (near the bottom Kirsch.)
Congratulations to BL, Komra and Budget. For all you blogad-o-philes, this demonstration is a must-forward for your colleagues and friends. And for those of your creating blogads, the bar another 200 pixels higher.
Here's more on how to design great blog advertising, from a post by Brian Clark.
| link
Lerma gets blogads
Pete Lerma of Clickhere, whose column in ClickZ I've always admired, got the Blogads vibe big in his column today. "It's becoming more and more practical for brands to embrace the blog movement." Thank you for joining the revolution Pete!
Also recapping Ad:Tech insights, Beth Kirsch concludes (in all caps, in case you miss it!) "BLOG ADVERTSING NEEDS TO BE PART OF THE CONVERSTION."
| link
Oceana job opening
Oceana, the first cause to advertise on blogs, is looking for an e-marketing director.
We are currently seeking a truly “out of the box” strategist to lead Oceana’s cutting edge environmental on-line activism and marketing program. The Director will focus on growing, activating and fundraising from Oceana’s worldwide base of 260,000 plus e-activists via email alerts, blogging and savvy management of the Oceana websites...You can read the full CraigsList offering here.
| link
The latest turn in the conversation
The ultra-sweet blogads for Anne Rice's latest book, Christ the Lord, link to blog posts about the book. The conversation continues: "suddenly my blog traffic spiked. It felt like Anne Rice was sending all those people over to read my stuff." Yes, when things go right,"markets are conversations."
| link
Chicago
Every time I come to Chicago, I'm impressed. Today I'm attending Blawgthink, a gathering of 100 lawyers which is being held in Catalyst Ranch, a retro-space in a rehabbed warehouse in the middle of town. A really cool spot.
| link
Tricycle wine
The Molnar brothers, friends from Budapest now living in Berkeley, have just launched the Tricycle Wine Company.
| link
The winner's curse...
Just won a political race but new to politics? Rush order Taegan Goddard's book "YOU WON--NOW WHAT? -- HOW AMERICANS CAN MAKE DEMOCRACY WORK FROM CITY HALL TO THE WHITE HOUSE."
Here's the first chapter and here's where you can buy the book.
| link
Food for the soul
Geraldine Hartman, author of Not Just for Vegetarians, Delicious Homestyle Cooking, the Meatless Way, writes:
As an author, my experience with Blogads.com has been wonderful. Excellent customer service (especially follow-up) is often hard to find these days; it is alive and well at Blogads.com. Thanks to Lanae and everyone at Blogads for making my first experience such a positive one, placing ads on some of the great food blogs that they represent. Cheers from Canada!
| link
Blogads made the difference
From the organizer of SpeakOutCalifornia comes this comment on DailyKos:
Of the $300 billion spent...I can't help but think the best roughly a thousand dollars that anybody spent on this thing was on Speak Out California's tiny little blogad buy.Here's their ad.
| link
Go home before you read this!
AdAge asks: Should employers allow their staff to read blogs in the workplace?
Next up: is breathing a waste of time? Should coffee machines be licensed? Should toilets be metered?
Thank you Tig.
| link
The new logo
Created by Karl Frankowski and referred by Josh Rubin of Coolhunting. Karl gets $1000 and Josh gets $300. Both get our thanks. And the blogosphere gets another case study of the fun things that emerge when a swarm of people brainstorm in public.
Thank you to aeveryone who contributed logo ideas. You can see all their submissions and comments here. You can see the finalists here. And for background, here's the original manifesto.
(We'll be getting the new logo live on this site once we can adust a couple of things in the current layout.)
| link