blogads for the opinion makers

Matt Welch stumbles on one reason why sponsorships beat pay-per-click models.

Hey everyone, make sure not to click on those GoogleAds about baseball crap over to your left! Wouldn’t want the advertisers to have all you yucky customers on their websites whilst sitting at a computer! Instead, click on the BlogAd about the new documentary film Little Man, which opens in L.A. tonight.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post (happily, no doubt) details the risk of advertising where real people are brainstorming.

Blogads.com makes it into the third sentence of the story. “Kaine’s campaign had purchased the space through a broker that put his advertising on numerous liberal-leaning blogs.” If the ads’ provenance is worth mentioning, why not toss in the name of the “broker,” aka Blogads.com? In the interest of full disclosure, should WPost have mentioned that ads like Kaine’s would have in the past appeared in the pages of Wpost.com, and that this “broker” is poaching hundreds of thousands in ad revenues a year from the august pages of Wpost.com?

If publishers want to flee “upmarket” (ie peddling content in which people can’t think aloud and/or write what they really think) rather than fight blogs on their own turf, great. (Wondering what the heck I’m talking about, read this book.)

There’s apparently the first $10K winner for Budget’s blog-based treasure hunt.

“Each week’s treasure hunt will begin on Monday morning and end the following Sunday at 11:59 pm EST.” There are four cities each week, with a $10K prize in each.

Apparently, folks are skipping work to head out and hunt for these. Luckily, it appears none are cached in our area. Here’s the cool blogad Budget is currently running.

How quickly will spam start to flow to this address?

Come and get it boys: nickblogads@gmail.com …

Other potential headlines:

Blog, blog, blog, Budget.

RIP: the press release

In a lightly branded online/offline game, Budget rental car has launched the first blue-chip online/offline treasure hunt, Upyourbudget.com, conceived by a blogger BL Ochman, illustrated by a blogger Hugh MacLeod, run on blog software Movable Type, advertised exclusively on blogs, and first reported by blogs like Adrants and MarketingVox.

More details from Adrants and MarketingVox. MarketingVox quotes Ochman: there’s no press release for the game. It’s all blog, baby.

We went to the state fair Wednesday night. The air was a balmy, buzzing black pillow splashed with whirling pink and orange neons. The grinning carnies took money joyfully from kids and adults alike, $2 a ball toss, $2 to race a car for 45 seconds, $2 to pull a coke bottle upright. We spotted the fine print (”an outstanding illusion!”) and missed the snake lady. The bumper cars were the only trickless joy.

Last night, 100 kids playing Bach and Twinkle. Stunning to see what kids achieve.

Driving into work this morning I stumbled into this sad Sarajevo retrospective. I was in Budapest then and regret my inaction.

We sometimes get requests from potential advertisers who need help creating compelling blogads. So we’re going to link to some folks who are able to help. Here are some cool examples from Jay Ballenger.

I should also mention that I’d recommend Charles Fincher’s cartoons as a unique hook into the blogosphere’s psyche.

Now appearing on a number of music blogs. Here’s the ad and a short analysis.

I’ve just lost 10 IQ points while posting this. Thanks Mom!

Brian Clark, auteur of blogad campaigns for Audi, Levis and Sharp TV, has started running Blogads on an indie movie blog community he’s organized, IndieWire.

Today Brian published an illustrated page with six great tips on How to Write a Killer Blogad.

Thank you dude! (I’m going to send you a Reemco gift certificate shortly.)

I’ve been arguing that anyone who thinks the “old media” model is a gonner should stop theorizing and just short newspaper stocks.

“Newspaper” is an oxymoron. Nowadays, anything on paper is either history or a novel. Though newspaper companies are buying and building online extensions, the revenue gains will never offset the scale of losses coming as subscribers and advertisers defect to cheaper, faster tools AND as individual papers lose their monopoly pricing leverage in their respective markets.

Another idea: the more I see of big ad agencies, the more I understand that they are a siamese twin of mass media, each a command and control hierarchy built to achieve economies of scale at the cost of human voice and intimacy. In a mass market environment, the model works wonderfully. Will it stand up in the age of DIY and p2p and conversational markets?

My bet: 1000 smart people in a line are not smarter than 10 smart people in a circle.

Anyway, here are two big agencies to consider shorting to test this hypothesis:
Omnicom (OMC) today at $79, a P/E of 19
WPP (WPPGY) today at $49, a P/E of 27

At Fox, Greg Simmons writes about this week’s Godblogcon at Biola University in California. Greg kindly turns to me for the cliched-but-essential “Huge Revolution” comments. In an industry that is always looking for trends and firsts, Greg’s article, the first in major corporate media about the event, also articulates a key new ripple that will become a tide. While conservatives might have seen past Boston-based Bloggercons as liberally situated and this year’s Blogher was certainly gender-sorted, Godblogcon is the first overtly ideological blogger convention. Certainly not the last.

The tape from our session at the API last week. Participants:
Fernando Espuelas, Chairman & CEO, Voy
John Bell, Senior Vice President & Creative Director, Ogilvy PR
Rich Skrenta, CEO & Founder, Topix.net
Henry Copeland, Founder, BlogAds
Moderator: Steve Rubel, Blogger, Micro Persuasion

At the risk of recursiveness, I’ll quote something Blogad buyer Craig Peters posted on his own blog after we added his testimonial to the Blogads site:

Henry Copeland and crew have a good thing going over there: a great service, coupled with great customer service. My only complaint is that there isn’t a much larger selection of blogs to choose from.

I’ve got a few other complaints of my own, but that’s definitely one. Thank you again Craig.

As Blogads grows, we’re refining our technology and processes. Growing, happily, also means hiring people. Over the last nine months, I’ve found that though it yields far fewer candidates than Monster.com, CraigsList returns the purest crop of folks who are on our wavelength. Craigslist applicants have technology skills, think outside the concrete box and are active participants in the new age of DIY. That’s one lesson.

Another thing we’re learning is how to interview. Since reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, which documents how our long-term impressions of people actually are formed (often very inaccurately) in our first five seconds of seeing them (no sound necessary!), I’ve been pondering how to overcome this handshake bias. Yes, how someone shakes your hand IS important, but that’s maybe where the judgement process should conclude, rather than begin.

Aren’t most of our transactions these days virtual? Don’t bloggers always say, on meeting each other for the first time, “you are just like your blog!” So our evolving strategy is to respond to interesting resumes with a few innocuous e-mailed questions. You can learn a lot from the response: speed, fluency, humor, sense of self, love of language. You also see how most of YOUR customers will see the person — not face to face but in a few fragments of written words and ideas and perhaps a phone call.

Next comes the standard reference check. (Though it seems that lots of employers skip this step these days?) Is the resume accurate? Is the individual outstanding? Do candidates stick with jobs and projects? Do they make good choices in navigating a career path? Next, another detour from the traditional hiring schedule: an IM interview. An hour’s spontaneous typing reveals a lot. Finally, a conventional handshake and some pizza.

Last week, we filled these two positions. Once we can move out of our current office into something bigger, by next month I hope, I’ll post another ad for more people to help us relate to bloggers and advertisers.

Jonathan Glater gave legal bloggers a nice write up today in the New York Times, including a mention of Blogads.com.

Also, Farah Miller, auteur of Random House’s many blogads, last night wrote me that she was going to “blogad” something. She apologized for being tired and using blogad as a verb… but I’m amused by the usage.

Finally a note for Blogads geeks: we’re (finally!) now tallying clicks on intext links like in this this ad. Link, link, link…

I got a chuckle out of Nick Denton’s analysis of Jason Calcanis’s rumored sale of WeblogInc to AOL.

The whole point about blogs is that they’re not part of big media. Consolidation defeats the purpose. It’s way too early. Like a decade too early.

Yesterday, in fact, I asked Jason what makes his company not just another publisher that happens to use blog software. His reply: “no editors!”

Did Al Gore just say “digital brownshirts”? Something like “they dispatch a team of digital brownshirts to harrass members of the press who dare to disagree with them.”

I’m sitting here at the American Press Institute. Al was funny and engaged the audience for the first five minutes, but now is lecturing.

To narrow down our choices, we’ve focused on submissions in which the word “blogads” is prominent yet spacially compact, legible if not crisp.

We’ll be choosing one of the following three logos. Please speak now or forever hold your peace. Which would look best on our site? (Click the “see in blogads” link to get an impression.) Which would be punchy on a bumpersticker or t-shirt?

1) Carm Hodzic’s Botox. A punchy image loved by many, though perhaps a little nicked.

2) The orange oval created by Kent Smith, a Blogads customer and t-shirt peddler.

3) Scriptive by Karl Frankowski is a staff favorite, though I personally don’t love the colors.

Thank you to the other finalists, particularly those who’ve been so generous with their advice and suggestions. I’m astonished by the level of participation and engagement among logo designers. Just as a record-setter’s pace depends on fast times run by competitors, the strength of the communal effort has made a substantial difference. We aren’t where we thought we’d be, but I’m very happy with the result, both in terms of the logo and the process of building it.

I spent Friday in Atlanta doing my last AMA blog thing. The highlight of the day was hanging out with two of our smartest customers.

I went to lunch with Richard Turner, auteur of Turner’s Vote Carrie and “Pie fight” blogads. Chowing at The Varsity — I downed a chocolate shake and diabolical onion rings — we mused about the buzz-making joys of buying ads on both sides of the ideological fence and the minute difference between hitting a solid double and a bases-loaded home run.

At 5PM, I caught up with Seth Miller, who designed those ads. We powered through two sweetwaters and a whirlpool of ideas, which Seth documents. Seth (another platypus) recently created a CafePress shirt after clicking on a blogad on Buzzmachine. Made me realize that CafePress needs to feature new, up to the minute, blogger-created T-shirts in its own blogads. Don’t tell people to create cool/newsie shirts, make them envy shirts being created in real time.