blogads for the opinion makers

I had fun answering questions from our neighbors Newfangled, who build websites for mid-size ad agencies’ clients. My favorite: “what is your super-power?”

Here. There’s a big shout out to The Gossip Gangsta Perez.

In today’s Washington Post, Howard Kurtz wrote that

Bloggers on the left and right increasingly drive media coverage by turning up the volume on questions until they are difficult to ignore. Sometimes they are right, as when they questioned what CBS’s Dan Rather said were National Guard documents in a 2004 report on President Bush’s military service that led to Rather’s ouster as the network’s anchor.

He could have amplified his point by adding, “Or drove Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott from office for praising the racist presidential campaign of Jesse Helms” or “Unseated Senator George Allen for calling a videographer ‘macaca.’” Unfortunately he went on to cover the “on the other hand” angle, by citing mistakes made by staffers for the New Republic and National Review… two old media organizations.

CuteOverload got lots of coverage today in a number-packed article by Dan Mitchell in the New York Times, with a guest appearance by blog advertising network Blogads.com. Kudos to Mitchell for packing so much into the article and cleaving so strongly to the numbers.

Mediapost credits Perez with scooping other major news outlets on the quake.

More blogads go up today for Dr. Myrna Vanderhood’s Pherotones, which was unveiled in the NYTimes.com as a tease for ring-tone seller OasysMobile.

The article lays out the pros and cons of viral strategies like this one deployed by ad agency McKinney & Silver, our neighbors in Durham.

“You have a brand that nobody knows what it is and you have a consumer that’s very specific,” said David Baldwin, the executive creative director at McKinney, a unit of Havas. “They don’t engage in traditional marketing. But they live online and they live with their cellphones.” …

And the planners of buzz marketing campaigns often say that in order to reach the modern multitasking consumer ‘ who may be simultaneously watching television, talking on a cellphone, reading the Internet and sending instant messages ‘ advertising must be a two-way conversation to have an effect.

“The consumers in that target demographic do not want in-your-face marketing,” said Gary Ban, the chief executive for Oasys Mobile. “We wanted something that was risqué, funny and something that involves the consumer. If you’re doing something that they can identify with, that they can participate in, that’s basically something that that generation can tune into.”

The “is it OK to fool consumers?” question also comes up in the article. The question is a canard in this case, since Pherotones was clearly a prank from the get-go, at least to anyone old enough to click a mouse. (Here’s an earlier rant on foolish worries about fooled consumers.) In a stroke of genius, McKinney has included Adrants, one of Dr. Myrna’s critics, in the latest buy.

Sadly, the new round of Dr. Myrna’s blogads dump all the text links into one page, rather than linking to multiple pages on the site, particularly the video. More importantly, the ads should link to blogs talking about Dr. Myrna — see fun examples like 1, 2,3, 4, 5. Multiple links help prove that advertising really is a multi-filament conversation and not a one way monotone. (See examples of great blogads from Kelloggs,Audi, Budget-renta-car, Knopf, Warner Brothers Music, TBS.)

Blog advertising got some nice mentions in the press earlier this month that I didn’t highlight. The WSJ included a nice graph of some data we provided and this overview:

For bigger advertisers, finding the right blog is critical, which is where Blogads.com comes in. Blogs that have been in existence for at least six months and have a dedicated readership can join Blogads.com’s database, which currently lists about 750 sites. Advertisers use Blogads.com to find blogs with suitable content (technology, media, fashion) or political slant. They can purchase ads through Blogads.com by the week or the month. Prices range from $10 to $3,000 for better-known blogs. Marketers can chose which sites to advertise on and bloggers can accept or reject the ads.

Henry Copeland, Blogads.com’s founder, works with marketers to create successful blog ads, which he says should be different from regular Web ads. “We just kind of shudder when we hear from an advertiser, ‘Wow, I hear blogs are cool and cheap, and I want to be on a blog,’ ” he says.

Instead, he advises advertisers to think like bloggers, and remember they are joining an ongoing conversation, incorporate links to other sites and use a voice that fits the blog’s general tone. Above all, he says, they should stop hitting readers over the head with giant logos. One good example he points to is an ad that Knopf, a publishing division of Bertelsmann AG’s Random House, designed for Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s most recent book. Rather than linking to a site that sells the book, Knopf’s ad joins in the spirit of blogging by quoting and linking to other blogs that discuss the book, such as MetaFilter.

And here’s what Aline Vandyun wrote the Financial Times on March 28:

If all goes according to plan, more than 1m Americans will soon be gripped
by the mystery of the missing car. The hunt for a stolen Audi A3 – a sporty
hatchback that will hit US showrooms in May – will begin next week with a
launch party in New York.

At the event, the thriller’s first scenes will be shot, with pictures and
clues about the theft then distributed on the internet. From there,
participants in the chase will use interactive tools to choose alternative
plot endings.

How will the publicity be generated? With the latest weapon in the ad man’s
arsenal – blog advertising.

Blogs, web logs or journals, which cover topics from politics to parenting,
have such enormous followings that marketing and advertising executives can
no longer resist advertising in them.

The most recent Pew Internet and American Life Project, which researches
internet use, found that 7 per cent of the 120m US adults who use the
internet have created their own blog. Assuming one blog per person, this
comes to 8m US blogs alone. The study also found that 27 per cent of US
internet users say they read blogs.

“It’s a brand new space, but when you get the right kind of messaging in
it, the results can be astonishing,” said Brian Clark, who has bought blog
ads for agencies Weiden+Kennedy and McKinney-Silver, including for the Audi
campaign.

Blog advertising came into its own during last year’s presidential
election. For the first time, political parties had budgets and strategies
for online advertising. Recognising this, bloggers sold space on their
sites.

“Blogs themselves have started to realise the potential for blog ads and
much more space has become available,” said Michael Bassik, director at
Malchow Schlackman Hoppey & Cooper, which ran John Kerry’s online
presidential campaign.

He admits that a year ago he dismissed the idea of blog advertising. Now,
he has clients spending up to Dollars 15,000 per week on blogs. “You are
reaching a very actively engaged group of people, much more so than readers
of more general web sites,” he said.

Large companies such as Sony and Amazon have advertised on blogs, and the
likes of Nike and GE are also experimenting with the medium.

For bloggers, selling ads provides income to support their hobby or even
helps them make a living.

Blog ads are cheap compared with other forms of advertising. Blogads.com,
where ad buyers can take space on blogs, lists its most expensive placement
at Dollars 3,000.

This buys you a week in the top slot on dailykos.com, which claims to be
read daily by more than 400,000 “committed progressive activists”.

Demand this year has been higher than expected.

“March blog ad sales will exceed our best month last year,” says Henry
Copeland, director of Blogads.com. “We thought it would be the end of 2005
before we got back to (presidential) election levels.”

The United Church of Christ, a protestant church with about 1.3m members,
became aware of bloggers after two television networks, NBC and CBS,
refused to run a UCC commercial showing a gay couple trying to enter a
church.

“We were impressed by the power of the blogs,” said Robert Chase, director
of communications at the UCC. “We decided to include blog advertising in
our next round of commercials. We have had such a great return that we will
now always consider blogs in any campaign.”

UCC spent Dollars 1m on cable televison ads and Dollars 15,000 on the blog
campaign. With about 74,000 clicks so far (the ads run until the end of
March), the cost per viewing of the ad was about 20 cents, Mr Chase said.

Blog ads clearly generate interest, but users say the ads work best if they
engage the reader. “In the blog sphere, a standard, loud ad is the
equivalent of yelling at a cocktail party,” said Mr Clark. “The ads need to
be designed so that the bloggers are part of the conversation.”

It is not yet clear if big advertisers will go beyond small-scale campaigns
and make blogs a regular part of their marketing strategies.

“It is still not for everyone, but it can, at the moment, work for
specially targeted ads,” says Alycia Hise, account director at TMP
Worldwide, which buys blog ads for her education clients.

In the meantime, bloggers should look out for a missing car.

The Audi campaign chase is about getting bloggers to think of an A3 next
time they want to buy a car. Not so different to other ads, after all.

Blog advertising covered by Le Figaro, France’s leading paper. “Lus par des passionnés, des personnes éduquées, les blogs offrent des cibles de choix aux annonceurs. A force de fréquentation, certaines pages, et ceux qui les animent, sont élevées au rang de stars de la blogosphère, attirant autant de nouveaux lecteurs.”

Mediapost: “Blog Readership Up In ‘04; Advertisers Not Sold.” John Montgomery, CEO of WPP Group’s mOne North America notes, “the blogs generating all the buzz are those that our clients think too risky to associate with.” Funnily enough, MediaPost’s fairly downbeat article has spawned more calls from ad agencies than the average.

And today’s Financial Times article “Niche appeal of the blogging business” gives blog advertising lots of positive ink, though I’m tagged as CEO of DailyKos. Richard Turner of TBS offers a good strategic overview of his “Vote Carrie” blogad campaign: “First, he says, it injected a note of levity into rather po-faced political blogs and exposed TBC to new audiences. Plus, he adds, the cutting-edge character of blogs can create a buzz akin to word-of-mouth; some of the medium’s techno-hipness can rub off on the product.”

Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell in Foreign Policy

Every day, millions of online diarists, or ‘bloggers,’ share their opinions with a global audience. Drawing upon the content of the international media and the World Wide Web, they weave together an elaborate network with agenda-setting power on issues ranging from human rights in China to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. What began as a hobby is evolving into a new medium that is changing the landscape for journalists and policymakers alike.
…
The media only need to look at elite blogs to obtain a summary of the distribution of opinions on a given political issue. The mainstream political media can therefore act as a conduit between the blogosphere and politically powerful actors. The comparative advantage of blogs in political discourse, as compared to traditional media, is their low cost of real-time publication. Bloggers can post their immediate reactions to important political events before other forms of media can respond. Speed also helps bloggers overcome their own inaccuracies. When confronted with a factual error, they can quickly correct or update their post. Through these interactions, the blogosphere distills complex issues into key themes, providing cues for how the media should frame and report a foreign-policy question.

Small surprise, then, that a growing number of media leaders’editors, publishers, reporters, and columnists’consume political blogs. New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller said in a November 2003 interview, ‘Sometimes I read something on a blog that makes me feel we screwed up.’ Howard Kurtz, one of the most prominent media commentators in the United States, regularly quotes elite bloggers in his ‘Media Notes Extra’ feature for the Washington Post’s Web site. Many influential foreign affairs columnists, including Paul Krugman and Fareed Zakaria, have said that blogs form a part of their information-gathering activities.

…the blogosphere serves both as an amplifier and as a remixer of media coverage. For the traditional media’and ultimately, policymakers’this makes the blogosphere difficult to ignore as a filter through which the public considers foreign-policy questions.

…as more Web diarists come online, the blogosphere’s influence will more likely grow than collapse. Ultimately, the greatest advantage of the blogosphere is its accessibility. A recent poll commissioned by the public relations firm Edelman revealed that Americans and Europeans trust the opinions of ‘average people’ more than most authorities. Most bloggers are ordinary citizens, reading and reacting to those experts, and to the media. As Andrew Sullivan has observed in the online magazine Slate, ‘We’re writing for free for anybody just because we love it’. That’s a refreshing spur to write stuff that actually matters, because you can, and say things you believe in without too many worries.’

In Business Week today, Sarah Lacy gives a good overview of the challenges bloggers and Blogads face right now. To recap what I’ve said several times recently: with the lowest overheads in the media industry, bloggers and Blogads.com are here to stay.

Will post election blogads work for everybody? Absolutely not. But the US advertising market has turnover of roughly $250 billion a year; to keep a lot of bloggers in the clover, we just need to please a tiny portion of the market… folks like Mark Bennett and his clients. Back to BusinessWeek: “Certainly, the role of bloggers in the political season has caught the attention of some ad agencies. ‘Initially it was something we suggested clients try, and I think the results surprised them,’ says Matt Bennett, creative director at San Francisco ad agency Call & Response. ‘Now they’re coming to us and asking us to run a campaign solely on blogs to generate discussion.’”

Great lede about blog advertising: “The odds of making a living by writing a blog are a lot like the odds of a garage band turning out a hit album: It can happen, but you better enjoy the music and hang on to your day job in the meantime.” Lou Dilanar goes on give a complete run-down on blogads in Newsday today.

Some very kind words about us: “the economics of blogging have shifted rapidly, thanks to a simple but brilliant idea called Blogads, which allows bloggers to outsource the equivalent of a newspaper’s business and advertising departments, and focus solely on writing. You report! You decide! Blogads sends check!”

And more blog demonizing in the NYT: “If the Internet has been the source of vicious blogs and half-baked rumors, it has also often been a worthy watchdog on the mainstream media, a direct route to the candidates’ records and official Web sites and a means of instantly checking their half-truths and evasions through nonpartisan outlets like FactCheck.org at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center.”

Ben Hammersley gave us a nice plug in the Guardian, calling Blogads “a very simple way to sell space on your site.” And Nic Howell gave us a good mention as he chewed on the nuances of thin media in New Media Age. Unfortunately, it’s password protected.

Ironically, while Nic quoted me correctly, I’m wrong. Here’s the relevant extract: “Blogads customers are typically entrepreneurs, says Copeland. ‘Testimonials from advertisers say we have exactly the 500 or 5,000 people they’re trying to reach,’ he says. But despite opening up a new channel to customers, Copeland hasn’t had interest from ad agencies. ‘They’re part of the whole ecosystem of people which we’re trying to disintermediate,’ he says.”

OK, I’ll eat those words: we’ve seen some good interest from ad agencies in recent weeks and are realizing Blogads can fit well in their ecosystem.

Entrepreneurship is like ice-sculpting, right?

Matt Welch pummels the press poobahs who are busily creating a “publishing mini-genre” lamenting the dire state of American Journalism.

Reviewing books by Bill Kovach, Tom Rosenstiel, Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser, Matt is nauseated by the “factually uncluttered hyperbole,” unctuous “Statements of Concern,” and, most of all, the whiny poobahs’ self-congratulatory bias against other people mucking around in a business that THEY feel entitled to control by committee edict and academic fiat.

Written by people suckled on and situated in America’s news behemoths, the books fret that there aren’t enough behemoths and take this as a sign of impending doom. They either ignore the explosion of other news resources — niche magazines, blogs, cable channels, “fingertip access to 10,000 faraway newspapers” — or see these as negative.
Go read the whole review.

The CSMonitor reports: “Since May, 12 police departments ‘ in locations as diverse as Ozark, Ala., and Caddo Valley, Ariz. ‘ have signed up for the offer:” placing ads on police cars.

A critic says, “We’ve already tracked the rise of ads into every area of life from urinals to golf holes. I think this will diminish respect for the whole institution of police.” (Via Adrants.)

The company’s site explains, “If your local Law Enforcement hasn’t received Government Funding for Homeland Security or if your tax base is insufficient to provide the Vehicles your Department needs, your Local Government may be a candidate for our program. We have a virtually unlimited amount of capital available for Brand New, Fully Equipped, Local Law Enforcement Vehicles. Our Sponsors will require recognition on the vehicles. The Vehicle Theme can be your choice of very creative or conservative.”

Tackling the view that an Internet-powered glut will make words worthless, Nick Denton argues “even if bandwidth and publishing systems are free, talent and marketing critical mass will always be in short supply.”

John Motavalli interviewed by IWantMedia: “For the most part, editors at the big magazines stayed away from [the Internet]. So the major DNA that went into producing the magazine didn’t have much to do with the Web product. When I worked at Hachette New Media, I never once saw an editor from any of the magazines set foot on our floor.”

After visiting the Jeff Jarvis writes: Internet World trade show yesterday, “This year’s show is only a quarter the size of last year’s. It is pathetic. It is a physical embodiment of the word ‘nevermind.’ The show can’t even fill one room. AOL has the biggest booth and it is small; Real and Sprint are there; Microsoft has a small booth just so they can say they have one; Yahoo has a booth smaller than a Silicon Valley cubicle.”

Ironically, the show’s tagline, “Grow Your Revenue and Operate More Efficiently through Internet Technology” has never been truer than today. It’s just that the companies who best benefit from the Internet are too new or small or cheap to pony up for a ticket at the “low price” of $995 and are instead busy learning online.

Clark G. Gilbert, protege of disruptive technology guru Clayton Christensen, has been scrutinizing how newpapers operate online. He says, “the most disturbing thing is that newspapers now appear to be focused on replacing their high-margin business of print classifieds with the lower-margin business of online classifieds. If that’s all they’re doing with their online operations, we’d suggest that they shut them down tomorrow. The more important segment to tap is the area of new growth that the Internet has made possible, populated by new customers altogether.”

Surveying the evil swap that killed two newspapers yesterday, Ken Layne writes “I really, truly hate the newspaper business. Too bad I don’t have any other skills. Maybe it’s time to join the dockworker union and make $150,000 a year for scratching my ass and wrecking U.S./Asia trade.”

Writing about RSS/RDF wrestling, Anil Dash comments: “Blogger wasn’t named RPT: Recursive Publishing Tool. That’s part of why it caught on with normal people.”

On a day when Glenn gives a bodaciously illustrated link to topless UK hunting enthusiasts, I’m inspired to dredge up this article from a couple months back.

E&P: “It’s a newspaper advertising category that for decades has been owned lock, stock, and fur-lined handcuffs by alternative papers. But now increasing numbers of daily newspapers are coyly succumbing to the many seductions of sex ads.”

“‘I worry about the slippery slope of pursuing these ads,’ Hartford (Conn.) Advocate Advertising Manager Greg Shimer said. ‘I want our people to go after auto, hospitals, fashion — the ads alternatives don’t traditionally get.’” Nevertheless, in July “the Advocate began a two-month experiment of slightly relaxed standards — including bigger ad sizes and photographs (although only head shots are allowed) — to attract more business to its small adult-advertising section.”

Tony Pierce has mastered IM fiction chatting with people like Lenny Kravitz and Anna Kournikova.

Now, Dawn Olsen perfects the straight IMterview with writer Neal Pollack. He likens bloggers to “a prison full of lunatics shouting to see the warden.” He notes later that “you probably have as many loyal readers as the average midlist fiction writer.”

E-mail interviews often secrete preachy, overboiled prose; good IMterviews spurt globules of memorable text and, for those who care, record context and spelling.

I’d love to read articles woven from IMterviews. The writer would build her case, but the source documents would be linked for anyone’s perusal.

Tribune Company, owner of the LATimes and the Chicago Tribune, says that online revenues in August grew 29% to $6.4 million, up from $4.9 million in August 2001. The growth is attributed to the company’s CareerBuilder web site, says this article.

Meanwhile print classified sales declined 1%, with the biggest decline coming in the “help wanted” category, which was down 17 percent.

Cannibalization? Nawww.

Reviewing the newest Matt Welch and Tony Pierce note that no LA bloggers are quoted, although more than 200 are now listed at LAblogs.

This omission may be because quoting an LA blogger would have meant publicizing the neonetwork of Kaus, Volokh, Johnson, Havrilesky, Roderick, Simberg, Moxie, Pierce, Salisbury, Layne, Welch and the LAEXAMINER — all of whom comprise a Cabel of LAT Critics.

But I don’t think the exclusion of LA Bloggers was (just) cynical self-protection. A more subtle rule also applied. The article only quoted people who write for a newspaper (Safire), teach graduate students (Halavais, Grabowicz, Pryor), publish a book (Weinberger), or attend J-School (Milios).

Here’s what the LAT was thinking: “The rest of you aren’t worth quoting. You aren’t authorities. We can’t rely on you because nobody ‘official’ says you are OK. You haven’t been vetted. And if we quoted people who aren’t authorities, we’d lose our status as an authority.”

Of course, it is self-evident that nobody is better qualified to talk about blogging than members of the LA blogging community. They are authorities by right of their own experience posting millions of words and creating 100s of thousands of links. And they are authorities because they have, by daily inspection and ongoing dialog, vetted each other.

So, by clinging to its outmoded definition of authority, the LATimes abdicates its own claim to authority. The LA Times, like a plastic surgeon with a giant wart on the end of his nose, convinces us, but not in the way intended. The real story: bloggers can create powerful networks of mutually validated authorities, networks that exceed the vision and authority of traditional media.

Blind to its own blindness, the LAT is slouching towards irrelevance. (To paraphrase Tony.)

PS: Don’t miss Matt’s closing paragraph, which recounts his previous bad experiences as a “subject” of the LAT. And don’t miss Tony’s point-by-point deconstruction of the article.

Greg Beato writes: “Tools like Bloggingnetwork.com, which makes it easier to support independent content, and blogads.com, which actually gives you something in return for supporting independent content, are a valuable addition to the blogosphere. Will they survive? Who knows? But I think it’s great that they’re here, and hope to see an increasing number of similar efforts.” And Neil Dodds writes: Blogads “represent a form of micro-targeting similar to classified ads in a local newspaper or fan ads in a zine. In many cases, but by no means all, audiences will be smaller than those of big media, but this is offset by the ads’ reach and low costs.”

Wired News reports: “Gartner, Neilsen//NetRatings, Forrester Research and International Data Corporation don’t have a single analyst involved in gathering blogging data. ‘The area of weblogs isn’t covered by our analysts because there is such a limited amount of data,’ said Grace Kim of Neilsen//NetRatings. ‘Right now it’s not that popular, and there is no data.’”

The first blogging TV personality is an 800-year-old Brazilian vampire who wears armor and a horned helmet. According to today’s NYTimes, the Internet division of the Brazilian media conglomerate Organizações Globo has done a deal with Pyra to provide blogs for several fictional characters from its new soap opera “O Beijo do Vampiro” (”Kiss of the Vampire”).

I had been betting on Homer Simpson as the first TVirtual blogger.

Pyra boss Evan Williams says he thinks 13% of 750,000 bloggers are Brazilian.

Two flaks hyperventilate about blogs. “It is not surprising to see a single hit on one key blog turn into mentions on several others.” Welcome to the viral vortex, folks. Your lives will never be the same. (Via Scripting News.)

Newsweek has returned to cover blogs for the second time in three months. The sharp shift in tone, from skepticism to evangelism, sums up blogging’s trajectory.

In the May 20 story, blogs were interesting only as newspaper competitors. Journalist Steven Levy concluded, “Blogs are a terrific addition to the media universe. But they pose no threat to the established order.”

Now, on August 26, Newsweek decides “the fun has just begun.” Mr. Levy portrays blogs as friend-finders, PR-boosters, brainstorms, and potential life-proxies. “Real-life… sometimes intrudes on the Blogosphere. One day there may not be a difference.”

Mr. Levy even writes a pseudo-blog. (My bet is that Mr. Levy started anonyblogging in the last three months, inspiring his conversion to the Church of Blog.)

There’s even a hint of Newsweek’s next story as his blog closes with a reminder to “call Glenn Reynolds and ask him if he’s made any money.” Yes, Mr. Levy, we’re working on it.

(Via Instapundit.)