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.

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.)

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.

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.”

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.’