Reviewing the advertising campaign our team put together for Trident on PerezHilton.com, Clickz said:

This Oscar campaign demonstrates the value of good cultural timing, a good media match, and a Web publisher that’s willing to get creative…in order to get the gold.

We’re definitely blushing.

Last week I tweeted this:

is Microsoft’s Atlas going out of business? e-mails bouncing, nobody picking up phone lines.

I thought someone at Atlas might get the message. Nope.

But today I got this from their able competitor Eyeblaster:

@hc Hey Henry, the phone is still getting answered over here. Anything that we can do to help out?

Eyeblaster is already ahead of its competitors in reporting and proactiveness, the SM focus just runs up the score.

BTW, I’m at twitter.com/hc and we’ll soon be pulling together a feed of staff twitter accounts.

Geraldine Hartman, author of Not Just for Vegetarians, Delicious Homestyle Cooking, the Meatless Way, writes:

As an author, my experience with Blogads.com has been wonderful. Excellent customer service (especially follow-up) is often hard to find these days; it is alive and well at Blogads.com. Thanks to Lanae and everyone at Blogads for making my first experience such a positive one, placing ads on some of the great food blogs that they represent. Cheers from Canada!

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.

One of the great joys of organizing Blogads.com is that I get to talk with some of America’s coolest writers and advertisers. Earlier this week, I got a call from Chug Roberts, who runs a specialist publisher focusing on legislative processes called TheCapitol.net. The firm has been buying blogads over the last twelve months and Chug wanted some feedback on their ads and to share some ideas about improving Blogads.com.

Chug also said a bunch of nice things about Blogads, and after we hung up, he put some of his praise in writing:

“Having experimented with Blogads last year, we’ve devoted a much-increased portion of our marketing budget to your service this year. Blogads is a great service, simple to use and control. For a niche publisher like our company, Blogads has been a fantastic resource for reaching potential customers we couldn’t otherwise hit at affordable prices. I talk Blogads up whenever I can.”

Thank you Chug! I’ll be putting your testimonial up on our front page later this month.

Danny Glover gives a great overview of the revolution in advocacy advertising spawned by blogs in the National Journal. The lede says it all: “Advocacy is a staple of the blogosphere, and advocacy advertising on blogs is quickly becoming a popular tool for groups hoping to mobilize the online masses.”

I should also mention that Farah Miller, who has bought a number of blogads for books including Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint and Camille Paglia’s Break Blow Burn, was the star of an article in Friday’s WSJ about new ideas in book marketing.

Book publishers generally stick to their tried-and-true formula for promoting a new novel: send the writer on tour, slip review copies to critics and negotiate strategic displays in bookstores. The Internet has been used to create barebones Web sites tied to new books, and the occasional advertising campaign on popular online destinations, but little more. Now, publishers like Knopf are hoping to supplement their traditional campaigns by wooing bloggers, giving away free copies online, and other initiatives.

You can see the full article here.

Brian Clark, the philosopher king of blog advertising and maestro behind the Sharp, Audi and Levi’s blogads campaigns, has finally stepped from behind the curtain to talk about his strategies.

My favorite “buzz seeding” tool currently is the amazing network over at BlogAds.com in part because of the interesting things you can do when you leave the IAB standards behind…

I’m relieved to see Brian write this, because he’s been threatening to dis us to scare other creative advertisers away from his favorite fishing hole.

Brian Clark, who orchestrated last fall’s purchase for Sharp TV and has a shockingly fun order up his sleeve:

Blog ads (in the generic sense, and especially BlogAds in the particular sense) are… bringing ads into the conversation. If they are done right, they out-perform traditional creative placements by so much it makes my clients nervous for me to talk about particulars.

Toby Bloomberg, Atlanta’s leading blog evangelist, has been working with one of her clients to test Blogads. The small test wasn’t a raging success. Toby has blogged the experience, and I’ve added some thoughts in her comments. I’ll repeat them here to have a copy secure for my own reference:

In a subsequent test, I’d love to see the creative engage more directly with the sensibilities of targetted blog(s).

As Toby noted, the best clicks came from www.TowleRoad.com, where the ad creative gave a nod to the blog’s gay readership. Next time, let’s nod harder…or wink or nudge or cajole! (Here’s that creative:

The creative for the other blogs could have run anywhere on the Internet. Here it is:

As Toby, Donna and I discussed before the ads ran, what makes each blog unique is its personality; blogads do best when they engage blog personalities. Great blogs inspire strong group identities. These groups see the world through a certain set of eyeglasses. They speak in certain codes and fixate on certain issues.

So ads ideally show the advertiser (and the product buyer) to be one of “us” rather than one of “them.” Show some friendliness towards a blog’s sensibilies and two good things can happen. Readers click AND clickers have positive disposition as they engage your offer.

Here’s a thought experiment that pushes this strategy to its logical (and profitable?) extreme.

Every marketer dreams of having a product that appeals to everyone; but most of us would be very happy to sell to 20% of a given marketplace. Consider, for example, Volvo, which sells roughly 100,000 cars a year in the US. What if, rather than simply observing that Volvo drivers tend to be Democrats (65/35), Volvo sought to align itself as THE itself Democratic light vehicle of choice by running ads exclusively in Democratic venues and discounting Volvos to key Democrats?

If a Volvo became an identity badge for Democrats, Volvo might lose 35,000 yearly sales to Republicans, but how many sales, out of the total US sales of 17 million a year, might be gained?

Of course, this is untenable for two reasons. Volvo is owned by Ford and Ford seeks to appeal to Republicans too. And Ford Inc has Republican shareholders.

But what an established, publicly traded company like Ford can’t do, a privately owned upstart with a clean-slate brand CAN.

Consider the success of Ben & Jerry’s. Heck, if frozen milk can tap into a political sensibility to grow a brand, anything can. Ben and Jerry were happy to forgo ambitions for a certain large market segment, the apolitical ice-cream consumers they could never realistically win anyway, to absolutely own another segment that was reachable.

So let’s bring this back to Gourmet Station. I’d love to see a package of ads that appeal very strongly to a particular sensibility and run on key blogs. Gun-rights activists? Girl-scout troop leaders? Bush-detractors? For Gourmet Station, what sensibility is the analog to the eco-liberals Ben & Jerry won over?

Therein may lie a gourmet recipe not only for a great blogad campaign, but for long-term company growth.

Michael Bassik of Malchow Schlackman Hoppey & Cooper writes a very kind review of blogads , including some feature requests. My wife, who also thought I was crazy during Blogads’ first 18 months, got a chuckle out of Michael’s lede:

At the March 2004 Politics Online conference at George Washington’s Institute of Politics, Democracy, and the Internet, Henry Copeland from Blogads posed a question to the panel on Internet advertising: ‘Have you considered placing ads on blogs?’ I was on that panel, along with Cliff Sloan from The Washington Post, Nick Nyhan from DynamicLogic, and Charles Buchwalter from Nielsen//NetRatings.

All of us on the panel had heard of blogs, perhaps even visited one or two before. But who would actually pay money to place a tiny tile banner alongside of someone’s random thoughts? We all thought Henry was crazy, along with everyone who agreed with him.