Live from Ad:Tech: Blogs and the Art of Evangelist Management
You may not make the word “blogvertising” part of your permanent vocabulary, but many marketers are interested in the returns they can bank from the practice of putting ads onto blog sites, judging by the strong turnout for a session on the topic at Wednesday’s Ad:Tech sessions.
Attendees heard about the benefits and possible pitfalls of blog advertising from a panel of experts including marketing consultants, bloggers, creative agency reps and operators of blog publishing networks.
Steve Rubel, vice president of client services for the PR firm CooperKatz & Co., said the potential of blogs to build word of mouth promotion was both attractive and a bit frightening for marketers. “If you have a brand that has any kind of evangelism and passion behind it, you can put your ad in the right places and get people talking about it,” he said. “While you hear a lot about search marketing, display ads and traditional advertising, I think the biggest opportunity is going to come in ‘evangelist management’.”
Brian Clark, CEO of GMD Studios, described how his company worked with agencies to produce online content for an Audi campaign called “The Art of the Heist”, an immersive Web entertainment experience that relied heavily on blogs as a messaging channel. The aim of the campaign was to use branded entertainment techniques and blogs to give the car maker a strong Web identity.
Cars are a long-lead purchase decision with a high degree of consideration, and that makes them a tough fit for Web marketing, Clark pointed out: “You can’t ‘click here to buy a car’. By using blogs, we were able to highlight the tech aspects of the car, the action-adventure premise of the campaign itself, and we could connect to people on all these levels apart from Audi’s normal messaging.” He said the blog component of the campaign took up one half of one percent of the marketing spend and generated 29% of the traffic to the Web site.
Beth Kirsch, affiliate group manager for LowerMyBills.com, illustrated the power of blog ads with an example from her former employer, Audible.com, the online seller of audiobooks. In the run-up to last year’s presidential election, Audible ran display ads on a number of political blogs of all stripes for political books by writers such as Al Franken and Ann Coulter and biographies of President Bush, Hillary Clinton and others under the tag line, “Listen before you vote.”
“The messaging was very different—less banner offer and more human voice taking part in the online conversation,” she said. “It was the kind of thing you might say to your next-door neighbor. Bloggers picked up on the campaign and were quickly followed by attention from The Wall Street Journal. Not only did the ad campaign achieve its expected investment returns, but the company was able to tap into the buzz and become a part of the online debate.
Blogs now serve as a publishing platform for the early adopters, and that creates word-of-mouth advertising that can reach the highly desirable “early majority”, said Shawn Gold, president and publisher of Weblogs Inc. Weblog’s company publishes the highly regarded Engadget tech blog among others and was recently purchased by America Online.
“Blogs are word of mouth on steroids,” Gold said. “They have become a trusted place for information gathering and pre-purchase research. When people go online and search on a brand name, they’re finding blogs up in the first five results.”
But Nick Denton, founder and president of the Gawker Media blog network, voiced skepticism that blogs ads can foster word of mouth and said that blogs ads should be bought instead for their audience demographics: the “younger, richer influencers” who are likely to be reading blogs.
