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.

“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.

(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.)

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

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”.

Read Krempasky who has been the claxon on this issue for the last 18 months. Full speed ahead to November ’06.

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.”

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.

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!”

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.

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.”

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.