Blogs in the news

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.)