I read an interesting article yesterday on Mediapost’s Marketing Daily: 8 Of 10 Americans Know About Blogs; Half Visit Them Regularly. This is a publication read by marketers, both traditional and online, across all industries. And it reminded me, again, that this is a topic I’ve been meaning to blog about.
Okay, my headline above may be a bit sensational, and maybe not a prediction the article makes per se. But read between the lines, people. Sure, ads are already blaring at you everywhere on major blogs like Tech Crunch, Read/Write Web, and GigaOm, but they’re really big media properties now. I’m talking long-tail blogs. Here’s an excerpt from the article (by the way, Mediapost, I love you, but how about starting to put *links* within your stories? like to more details about the study itself?):
Ad spending on blogs is still in its infancy … the eNation study, conducted in late July, shows there is real potential for ads on blogs. Among people who have visited a blog (485), 43.2% said they have noticed ads on blogs, and three out of 10 people in this group said they have clicked on ads while visiting a blog. Among the youngest consumers, a whopping 61.2% of 18- to 24-year-olds said they have noticed ads on blogs.
Some advertisers are trying to slip brand names in through the blogosphere’s back door by recruiting bloggers to write favorably about their brands…
That latter point is something I wanted to focus on today. It speaks to a major trend to watch in how advertising will be spreading onto blogs: that is, “sponsored content” versus traditional ad banners or text-link ads. The former seems to be coming on strong, on multiple fronts. Sponsored content can be whole stories written in news or editorial style and placed on blogs (or social networks, for that matter) — much the same as many “mat services” have done for decades as a service for small, weekly newspapers (which you know if you’re in the PR business) — to a blogger’s own writing that is directly influenced by and paid for by a sponsor (and hopefully disclosed by the blogger!), to even paragraphs written by a sponsor and paid for and just dropped in by the blogger, with blogger editing even allowed (yes, it’s being pitched out there — I know). There are many creative ways that “advertising” will be infiltrating and propating on blogs. So, hold on for the ride….
What do you think? Which kind of advertising would you rather see on blogs? (Relevant ads, of course — that’s a given.) Or how about on this blog right here?
For that matter, should I even be accepting advertising at all, in whatever form?
UPDATE: And for more on the growing readership of blogs: Blogs Make Tech Impact: 78% of Tech Journalists Read Them.
2nd UPDATE, 9/4/07: And yet more: One-third of blog visitors have clicked a blog ad, study says.
It’s hard to argue that the man doesn’t see the big picture. This recent article in the New York Times tells the story very well: 
On hard times lately, the agency recently announced that its chairman, Pat Fallon, was 
It was hard for even an experienced ad guy and marketer like me to take it all in over two days — but I tried anyway. 
Standards are needed here badly, and soon — and this technology could very well jolt the industry into some action. Adustables is a recently 
An 
The two agency execs on the panel had some great insights as well.
I know its painful for you purists out there (trust me, it hurts me, too), but I just can’t fit in my big camera at these things. I have to travel light. These will still give you a feel for things, I hope, here at 
(Times getting tough, Eric? I know you’re trying to control that headcount now, but why is the party budget always the first to go?) I did hear WebTrends took some people to the Cubs-Phillies game, but that was about it. There were likely other, smaller gatherings, however — with 3000-some people at this thing. The majority of the attendees turned out for this one, big, official party, however (sponsored by CIMA) — so, it was mobbed. One free drink ticket and some minimal muchies — whoopie. But everyone seemed to be having fun, whether indoors in the AC, or out in the humid air on the crowded, narrow deck alongside the river. 
(How do I always manage to meet surfers at conferences? Global tribe, indeed…) He covers the Midwest, so had recently been in Mpls to meet with Target. He said he’s hearing advertisers wanting technology that would let web users pull widgets off their ads to put onto their own SN sites. Pretty cool. Also ran into Manoj Jasra, director of technology for B2B search firm Enquiro in British Columbia. He’s here blogging for his own blog and has a close relationship with WebTrends (but missed the bus to Wrigley Field).
But here goes, Farren: you asked what’s one cool thing we need in online advertising but don’t have yet? Okay, listening? It’s the ability to target brand messages to very specific, pinpointed demographics across all the social networking sites that are proliferating out there — thousands and thousands of them (not just the big ones everyone’s heard of). Think long tail, and because all those SN sites need to monetize to stay alive. That’s just got to happen, and I’m betting it will soon. So, there ya have it! 
Geoff Atkinson, marketing chief at Overstock.com, reiterated that “traffic is just getting so much more expensive to acquire.” His firm started using BT about a year ago. “When a customer first arrives, for example, we log how he or she got there — by a certain keyword, for example. Then, on the next visit, we know that customer and feed them something that’s relevant.” Brent Hieggelke, VP of strategic marketing at Omniture, said when he first joined the firm, his friends thought all this “on-site targeting was hocus-pocus.” But it’s quickly become for real. His firm calls it “automated 1:1 targeting.” The customer hits the site, and their technology builds a profile. “It’s a self-learning predictive modeling engine,” he said. “The optimal content decision can then be sent to the CMS (content management system).” What data is used to select content? “Site behaviors, temporal aspects (such as time of day), environmental aspects, and referrer values,” he said. “This enables companies to quit having those weekly meetings to decide what goes on on the home page.” It now can all be automated, down to the individual. Hieggelke also noted his firm has found that the log-off page is a great place for targeted ads. “Behavioral targeting is bringing marketing back to the marketing world.” A few good questions then came from the audience. The first was “What percentage of users totally wipe out their cookies regularly?” Omniture’s Hieggelke said he’s seen some say as high as 15-30%. “But we find it’s only in the single digits.” A second question related to customers’ concerns for privacy. “We think it’s important to keep a customer mindset,” said Kefta’s Suchet. “Don’t capture too much data — find just what’s relevant to you.” Omniture’s Hieggelke added: “A customer’s name and social security number has no value to us at all.” Suchet added that BT enables campaigns to be “continually learning, changing — you can’t sit still, you must always adjust based on what competitors are doing and so forth.” A final audience question: When building profiles, what data do you use? “Primarily clickstream data,” said Omniture’s Hieggelke, “because that’s easy. But also data from your CRM system, and whatever else is determined to be predictive. Most companies take existing web analystics data and feed that in first.”
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