There’s been some huffing about Volvo’s purchase of ad space atop Microsoft’s “Spaces” blogging environment.

In an article titled “MSN Spaces/Volvo Deal Shows Big Blog Advertisers Crave Safety” in Webpronews
Steve Rubel wrote that a big brand “craves safety, as the Wall Street Journal noted last month. They are skittish about advertising on blogs. As a result, they will gravitate towards teaming with the larger players when it comes to experimenting with the medium.”

(In fact, only one ad executive in the WSJ’s article mentioned safety as an issue and the only ad “pulled” from a blog so far by an advertiser was running on a property of one of the “safe” corporate blog publishers Rubel highlights.)

Whatever. Volvo is getting a raw deal.

As Steve Hall of Adrants notes that most of Spaces blogs are “empty, useless, pointless weblogs.” “A quick review of weblogs listed as recently updated on MSN Spaces revealed few, if any, containing more than a post or two. Many simply state, ‘There are no entries in this blog.'” (Steve wrote asking what I thought of the deal — my reply to him seeded this post.)

To expand on Steve’s point, Volvo is, at best, paying to appear above MSNSpaces bloggers who are writing about random stuff, blogospheric noise. Spaces bloggers are newbies on the fringes of the blogosphere. Microsoft may well have promised Volvo 100 million page impressions a month, but these are impression seen by nobody — or more exactly “nobodies” — people who are viewed as influentials only by their moms and ex-girlfriends.

Sure Volvo’s brand is all about “safety” and Volvo may have felt safer buying blog advertising from Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft Spaces appears to censor profanity from blog titles and URLs, as Boingboing documented.

Buuuut… Volvo is still cozying up to the raw humanity of Microsoft Spaces bloggers writing
“fuck”
and
“cunt”
and
“nigger”
and
“faggot.”

All sponsored exclusively by Volvo. You go Volvo!

If you are a brand manager craving safety and premium audiences, wouldn’t you rather sponsor name-brand bloggers like Markos Moulitsas, Glenn Reynolds, Dave Winer, Jeralyn Merrit, Josh Marshall, Andrew Sullivan, Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, Wil Wheaton, Jessa Crispin, Duncan Black, David Gutowski, Hugh Hewitt, Matt Haughey, John Sickles, Daniel Drezner, Howard Bashman… and hundreds more revered bloggers devoting themselves to themes like law or politics or music or religion or baseball? You can get ’em all here.

Why advertise on the blogs of the anonymous once-a-month-bloggers when you can associate your brand (probably at much lower cost!) with intellectual stars, folks who have national reputations in their respective fields and who are hubs for rabidly loyal communities? And why inrich Bill Gates’ another 0.0000000027% when you can put money directly into a smart blogger’s pocket?

Blogging is the ultimate meritocracy and the name brand of Microsoft (or any other traditional publisher) is no guarantee of quality or safety. On the contrary, corporate umbrellas are increasingly havens for publishing mediocrity. Rushing to be trendy, Volvo has bought the wrong end of blogging and ignored the only name brands that mean anything: the bloggers’.

(Update: as a humorous coda, I drive a 1992 Volvo 240 wagon and my colleague Anthony drives a ’95 Volvo 940, pictured partially below:

Jeff Jarvis: “The American Society of Newspaper Editors just reported that the number of newspaper journalists in America fell from 56,393 to 54,134 over the last four years.”

Tony Pierce comments: “how about this exercise: count how many print journalists you can name in three minutes. then count how many bloggers you can name in three minutes.”

You want to see the revenge of the long tail ? When it comes to creation of interesting local content, the tail whips here .

Just had lunch with Alex Macris, with whom we’ve done some business over the last year. He’s updated his agency’s website www.tapin.com which gives a pretty brilliant description of a certain slice of the folks advertisers are trying desperately to reach. Here’s a snippet:

Today’s young, digitally-savvy consumers have developed strong resistance to conventional advertising, even as they have become a favorite target of marketers worldwide. We call these consumers the NetSet’ ‘ and they are our audience.

NetSetters are off-beat contrarians who pride themselves on their innovation and individualism. They read Nietzsche, but watch cartoons. They work hard to differentiate themselves from the societal norm, but they do so in packs. They post their private thoughts and feelings into anonymous online journals to be read by the public. They hate being the target of advertising, but are always on the look-out for the ‘new-new thing.’

Macris just turned 30 and comes from an intense gaming background, as well as an unfortunate stint a law school in Boston. He’s among the handful of people I deal with who glimpse the future: advertising will have to engage rather than proposition consumers.

I love Welch when he’s mad at pompous torch bearers for mediocre corporate journalism. Here Matt dissects LAT columnist David Shaw’s assertions of journalistic privilege to shield laws versus the blogger rabble:

the culture of newspaper jobs is a culture of scarcity, over-editing, editorial circumspection, office politics, and both the good and bad tradition of modern-day newspapering. The culture of blogging is one of abundance, lack of editing, exuberance of expression, home offices, and both the good and bad “tradition” of a new and dynamically evolving medium. Are the differences between the two camps enough to deprive a journalism-producing weblogger the protections afforded a journalism-producing newspaper columnist? [Shaw writes]:

When I or virtually any other mainstream journalist writes something, it goes through several filters before the reader sees it. At least four experienced Times editors will have examined this column, for example.

Now there’s a walking advertisement for newsroom cuts…. Snark aside, it is not “filters” that make something “journalism,” it is the work itself. I can only speak for myself, but the act of writing without filters makes me much more careful in the treatment of facts and the truthfulness of words, because there’s no Copy Desk or Legal Department ready to vet the danger and check spelling. I’m slightly less careful only in the quality of the writing, and even then I assume that vomiting out verbiage sometimes produces net style positives compared with agonizing over every verb. Also, as someone who has written for a dozen newspapers, I’ll let the filter-awed readers in on a little secret: In every publication I’ve written for more than once, I’ve had final drafts published without so much as a moved comma. Some errors (few, thankfully) have passed through undetected, others have been edited in. Copy editing and especially fact-checking, at least in my experience, are the most overrated and wasteful aspects of modern journalism.

Read the whole thing please.

Meanwhile, academics are researching the personalities and demographics of bloggers. “We know that bloggers are not representative of Americans in general in certain respects,” Halavais says. “They tend to be younger, more urban, more educated, more technologically adept. They’re also early adopters and more willing to speak publicly about certain issues than other Americans, most of whom do not blog or even read blogs,” he adds.

A number of bloggers and readers have been asking “what the heck is up with those Virgil Tatum ads?” One reader called him “an obnoxious egomaniac.” A magazine writer inquired about profiling him. An agent asked about representing “Nisha,” the art theft recovery expert linked by another of the ads. Well here’s one gamer’s overview of the context of “Heist,” the Audi A3 advertising narrative that weaves it all together.

We here at ARGN prefer to see this particular instance of “blog advertising” for what it really is: the tip of the ARG iceberg. Props to Audi for joining the ranks of those who realize the potential of Alternate Reality Gaming. In true automotive spirit (as it is in Alternate Reality Gaming), the ride’s the thing, so get behind the wheel, buckle yourself in, and get ready for a trip you won’t soon forget.

Or as another gamer put it, offering a compendium of all the pieces to date

Heist is what we like to call an Alternate Reality Game (ARG). Simply put, it’s an interactive story told using real life events, character interactions, and Internet websites. We know that Heist is sponsored by Audi, but don’t think of it as a marketing campaign. Take it for what it is – a very fun and enjoyable game which you can participate in for free.

This campaign reminds me one of those four page ad fold-outs you get in the New Yorker or Vanity Fair that invite you to imagine yourself within a slightly Daliesque alternate universe inhabited by exotic brunettes, fast cars and melting clocks. Only in this case, the ad can be folded out to hundreds of pages and the reader can actually live a little of the fantasy both online and, even, offline.

But it goes beyond the individual’s experience, the solitary pleasure of reading a magazine. What is amazing about this multi-ad campaign is its synchronization with the blogosphere’s collectivist approach to information gathering, its unique ability to piece together a narrative. This is an ad campaign that is best experienced with others.

An interesting aside for bloggers — this is the biggest single blogad campaign yet, representing as much revenue for bloggers as the entire Q1 of 2004. (Don’t worry, with total US ad spending at $250 billion, there’s still plenty more growth ahead.)

Some broader context: I drank the blog CoolAid nearly four years ago late one Thursday afternoon, but am more convinced every day that something fundamental is happening here that exceeds our current rational understanding of community and social engineering. The point isn’t the individual blogger. It’s the collective, known to friends and enemies as the blogosphere, wired together at the speed of light for the first time in history.

Folks are repeatedly amazed that these “disorganized” “unemployed” “biased” “untrained” bloggers are regularly thrashing corporate media at its own game. (Need more fuel? See Ed Morrissey’s scoop that has set maple leafs aflutter and CampusJ‘s upending of a NYT story.)

The fact is that top-down organizations are vastly overrated and don’t stand a chance about organically evolved multi-party collaborations. The best MIT engineers have never come close to building a structure as elegant and efficient as the hive that 10,000 bees, with an average IQ of 22 and no boss giving directions, can build together in a week. Why doubt the enormity of the hive that 10,000 humans, with an average IQ of 125 and empowered with some new tools, can imagufacture together? What are Google’s 10,000 servers compared with the collaborative mind-power of 10,000 humans, each with at least 100 billion neurons?

One of my favorite advertisers just sent this note:

Okay, no one is ever going to understand this, but after reading this guy’s description of his site in your interface I’m going to have to buy ads on him now. Just fucking love subversives: his copy writing skills with the below make a $20 2 week slot the equivalent of tipping a clever panhandler.

The Decadent West
The Decadent West is the most visited weblog on the planet, attracting over 1,000,000,000,000 visitors a second. Fucking amazing, isn’t it? Just ignore that other number to your right. It’s completely incorrect. OK? Just remember: 1,000,000,000,000 visitors a second. If only 1% of these people click on your ad, and only 1% of them purchase your wares, you will be rich. Easy money, my friends. Easy money.