In LA, we like to take advertising to extremes.
Online marketers are becoming increasingly elaborate in their experiments with attracting and harnessing the attention of social media users. There is a ton of Twitter-pontificating and blog hand-wringing on this topic but all of it centers around pinning down the exact hoodoo voodoo for getting social media mavens to endorse your product without violating the regulations recently passed down by the FCC. Bloggers want to know how they’re going to make money from their blogs. Advertisers want to know how they’re going to get the attention of consumers who can block their ads or fast-forward through them. Everybody’s confused, and everybody’s convinced that these old skool methods don’t work anymore, so they’ve started throwing stuff against the wall to see what will stick.
The thing is, the solution for how to monetize a blog and the solution for how to best use online advertising space are one in the same, and it doesn’t involve creating microsites or funding product placements. Nor is it to insist on bigger, roll-out display ads, or to flood the market with cheap context adversiting. The solution now is what it has always been — display advertising — but a new form of it.
Display Advertising 2.0 is the name for a smarter, more cost-effective and a micro-targeted version of display advertising for superior products that is accessible to advertisers of all sizes and budgets. It works by doing a lot of upfront due diligence, and culminates in placing ads directly where they will be most appreciated: in the sidebars of the blogs (and message boards) frequented by their ideal consumers. From there, it spreads to the content column through organic discussion, not paid placement, and from there to other outlets — Twitter streams, Facebook pages, and so on, through word of mouth. It is designed to exploit the influence of a particular blogger’s community without compromising the integrity 
of the blogger’s content. And it cannot work unless we all — advertisers and bloggers looking to monetize — do our homework.
With Social Media, The Goal Is To Get Into The Content Column Without Looking Like You Had To Pay To Get There
Look at the ads in my sidebar right now: they are for Party City, Orowheat, and Chevy Equinox. I might go to Party City once or twice a year, and occasionally I’ll buy a loaf of Orowheat bread, but I don’t have any particular brand loyalty to either advertiser: they are both OK products, I suppose, but I could just as easily buy from somebody else. There’s nothing spectacular, in my opinion, about either product. I doubt that their placement in my sidebar will have any effect, good or bad, on my habits as a consumer. With Chevrolet, the situation is even worse, because never in a million years would I buy a car built by Chevrolet. I don’t buy American cars, because I think American cars are pieces of shit. And my readers might not feel the same way, but the likelihood is that there is some commonality between our collective opinions as consumers because they have come here to read what I have to say. So maybe they think American cars are OK, but they are probably not overly excited about Orowheat or Party City, is my guess. So putting ads for those companies in my sidebars is probably not a great ROI. Let’s face it. I’ll take their money for as long as they’ll give it to me, sure, but I don’t think they’re getting much from me overall. This is probably the first and last time I will every mention these kinds of brands in my content column, because they’re boring. Who cares about Orowheat? Who cares about Party City? Not me.
At present, the people who advertise through big blog networks like BlogHer are giant brands that people feel so-so about. These are brands that succeed because they are ubiquitous. I don’t see a revolutionary brand in my sidebar, I see brands that are already huge and intend to stay that way by flooding the market’s consciousness with placements across all kinds of media. These are brands that rely on me buying them (or from them) because that’s what choice I have. These brands use this kind of placement because it constructs the overall ubiquitousness of their brand for a relatively low price — consumers say, “let’s see, my stomach is upset, what should I buy?” and they buy Pepto Bismol (another advertiser in my sidebar), because that’s what people buy, right?
But what if I had a brand in my sidebar that was super exciting to me and, by assumption, to a big chunk of my readership? Wouldn’t I see it and feel compelled to talk about it — not because they are paying me, but because hey! did you see that? Or, failing that, wouldn’t one of my readers see the ad and want to talk about it? I started thinking about this for a couple of reasons: 1) because of a comment made by Kerry on a post the other day that ended up with a product making it into the content column through organic conversation, and 2) because of a post I clicked read (via the Federated Media Twitter stream) pointed out a reader’s comment that when she visited Notcot, she had to remember to turn off her ad blocker, because they were ads she wanted to see.
This is the kind of thing advertisers want to hear.
What advertisers want, ultimately, is to show up in the content column of a blog without looking like they paid to get there. This is the ideal placement, because the content is the focus of attention. When discussion of a product appears to have happened organically, then it is most effective. So how does a company get their product into the content column of a blog? Well, the old-fashioned way is to create an awesome product that people want to talk about. My own Commodity Fetishism blog features these kinds of products that I either recommend or that I want to try, and this is an ideal placement for advertisers because it is completely organic. I receive no compensation for these placements, and my readers trust that fact. A company wanting that kind of placement has to depend upon great product quality and a little bit of luck, which isn’t exactly a marketing plan.
Another way to make it into the content column is to sponsor events like the Zicam people did for The Broad Summit (as discussed in my last post). This kind of sponsorship is likely to lead to a discussion of some kind, because people take pictures and write recaps, and it inevitably comes up in conversation, whether by the blogger or by commenters. The only problem with this kind of placement is that you cannot guarantee that it’s going to result in favorable mentions, or any mention at all. Zicam got mentioned in my post because they sponsored an event , but I was being critical of the event, and though I doubt this had much of a negative effect on Zicam’s brand, this kind of placement is not exactly an ideal situation for all brands. And also, there are only so many events, and only so many bloggers out there who are invited to them. Brands would have to do a much better job of contacting bloggers and understanding micromarkets to exploit this method, and companies are just not equipped to handle this kind of thing at present, from what I can tell.
The last, and most effective way, I think, to make it into the content column is to find a way to get people to start talking about your product in the comments of a post by using a display ad that appears alongside the content that is super appealing to a blog’s audience. If my audience sees a display ad that is well-targeted to them, they will bring it up in the comments. They will say something like, hey look at that ad! That sounds cool. And then an organic discussion will take place in the comment section of my blog, and possibly this will spread to other outlets like Twitter, or to my readers’ blogs. This is the kind of thing you want to have happen, and in order for it to happen well, it is crucial to maintain the appearance of being objective. If you pay me directly to mention your product, it won’t work. If you write me an email about your product or send me a sample of your product, I might mention it, or I might not. Or I might say something bad. You have no control. What you need is a display ad that appeals directly to this micromarket, and you need to plaster my site with ads for it. That is how the conversation occurs, and that is how products are sold.
If I were running an ad agency, I would start pouring money into personnel that understand these markets. The best people to talk to about their markets are the bloggers themselves. Some will be more valuable than others in their ability to articulate the attributes of a certain market, just as some bloggers will be more valuable than others in terms of the size of their audience and the relationships they foster with it. If you have millions of readers, it doesn’t do an advertiser any good if they don’t trust your product recommendations, or trust the recommendations for products of all the community members of the blog. I think what advertisers need to do is to either employ somebody whose job it is to study the current (and by current I mean constantly updated — constantly) markets, who can tell you what Blog X’s market is, what their ages are, how many of them there are, how likely they are to buy a product when it’s mentioned favorably on the blog. Some of this information can be gleaned by surveys and the like, but they have to be much more scientifically administered than they used to be. What you are trying to guage here is influence, and this is not the same across blogs or across markets. A blogger might have a small readership that is very devoted: get the right product in that blogger’s sidebar ads, and people will talk about it, and then everybody will buy it. Even if it’s only a few hundred people, that is a huge return on a not-very-expensive placement.
More work has to be done on the front end of advertising. You need the person who can tell you 1) what the right product is and 2) who the right blogger is. These are people who read blogs and think about them, in every niche. These are bloggers. You can employ them as consultants with whom you have (very) regular meetings, or you can have somebody on staff who gives you constant updates. The blogosphere is constantly changing. there are new bloggers every day. there are people who quit blogging every day. There are people who have big readerships who start losing readers, or whose readerships change as they change. You need people who watch these changes. This is where the bulk of your money should go, as an advertiser: either to consultants through ad networks that do this for you, or to advertising companies that understand this and who are keeping their eyes on the blogosphere by participating in it, or in very isolated cases, directly to the bloggers themselves. The agencies that have done this and are continuing to do this now are the ones who will succeed in the changing social media marketplace.
TWEET THIS
{ 1 trackback }