The best blogad ever

If you check out the new ad top right on the Largeheartedboy blog you will see the best blogad yet, in fact, the very first real blogad.

Or, longer term, you can see the ad (and my commentary) here.

The ad, for a new book by Murakami Haruki’s new book Kafka on the Shore, is essentially a blog post about a new book site.

A blog ad.

The image isn’t amazing. The text is what’s exceptional.

Rather than trying selfishly to pull clicks to her author’s site, Farah Miller at Knopf Books bought the blogad to encourage readers to read other well-regarded blogs that have posted about Haruki’s book and site.

Like a good blog post, the ad doesn’t just quote, it links directly to the relevant posts on other blogs.

The ad won’t deliver directly countable clicks, but should spark more linking into the Murakami’s site (people read the other links and do their own posting about the site) and definitely earns you major coolness points in the blogosphere.

In any market segment, at least 70% of purchases are driven by word of mouth. So smart advertisers try to catalyze and amplify word of mouth… which is exactly what this ad does.

(BTW, visit blogads.com/examples to see a bunch of interesting past blogads… we’re just populating the pages now… if you’ve got past examples you’d like to nominate, please let me know. If you are a blogger publicize this page so we can get the word out. Smart ads do lots better than dumb ads and smart advertisers will put a lot more money in bloggers’ pockets in the long run.)