February 26, 2004
blogs as mass-advertising medium?
TobyZ made the following thoughtful comment on an earlier post:
"The problem with blogs for advertising - or anything else, for that matter - is that most net users don't know what they are, can't find them, and won't 'bookmark' them.
"You've mentioned Gerber, for example. Google shows 1.7 MILLION hits for Gerber. Does it matter whether your blog is hit #415, #415,000, or #1,415,000? No one is going to find it from a search engine.
"The gateway to your blog (for me) is a link at the top of the adrants.com site. When that goes away, your blog ceases to exist (for all practical purposes), and you can't control that.
"Blogs are for small groups of friends who are contributors. They can't reach the mass audiences that traditional media provide to advertisers. Once I post this comment and leave, I'm gone forever. I won't see any follow-up comments. I won't see any ads you might put here tomorrow.
"Blogs is not an advertising medium."
Oh, man, where to begin...
Well, if ABC, CBS and NBC had to follow the same economic rules as Toby assumes bloggers do, they wouldn't be selling much "mass" advertising, either. All they'd have to show the public would be a lot of empty offices and ticked-off shareholders. But of course, they don't follow these rules. And there's a reason.
To get millions of people to sit down in front of a TV channel for any length of time and soak up all those advertising messages, broadcasters first have to spend big money. How much does NBC burn through in a single day? $100 million? Heck, "Friends" alone must be setting them back $10 million a week.
And every year those numbers keep getting higher, as people find more and more things to do with their time, besides watching Chandler getting it on with Monica.
But providing advertising on blogs is not free to the blogger, either. Besides supplying the content necessary to attract the advertiser, the blogger has to find ways to drive traffic to her site. That means media buys, among other things. And to get serious numbers isn't cheap.
But then again, neither are sitcom actors, anchormen, journalists, TV producers, editors, researchers, Manhattan offices, camera operators, art directors, marketing managers, cafeteria workers, receptionists, and all the million and one things a big media company like NBC has to have in its arsenal before it has something viable to sell the advertiser.
Obviously, I can't individually get the numbers "Friends" has. But knowing what I know, I can get a couple of million people to soak up my client's message without too much trouble. Considering I don't have Jennifer Aniston's wages to pay for, I'm not complaining.
The issue isn't whether media is "mass" or "micro". The issue is always (A) how much trouble is it to get x people to your stuff/brand/media/message etc. and (B) what people do once they get there.
The line seperating "mass" and "micro" is an intellectual construct, it has nothing to do with economics.
If the blogosphere was willing to spend the same collectively per day as NBC in order to shift product on behalf of their clients, we'd see big, big changes in how advertising was done. 2 million blogs or so, $50 each on average? Hmmm...
Posted by hugh macleod at February 26, 2004 6:45 PMThere's no difference between mass and micro market on the internet. Great point Hugh.
Reaching the mass market used to hinge on distribution; few organizations could afford the means and publishers built up local monopolies around their economies of scale. Now those economies of scale are available to anyone with a laptop and cable subscription; the individual has the only monopoly around -- on his/her own talent.
Posted by: henry at February 26, 2004 7:32 PMI wouldn't be surprised if there was a credibility and loyalty effect as well. Readers of blogs will hit those ads out of a sense of loyalty and willingness to a help the blogger pay the bandwidth fees. The credibility comes in because we assume (rightly or wrongly) that the blogger would not allow a product or service to be advertised that causes an ethical dilemma. If we trust the blogger's opinions and adherence to principle, we will most likely trust the advertisers that offer goods and services on that blog. If market researchers looked at the demographics of different types of blogs (i.e. political, personal, tech, etc)they could probably offer the pooled blogs as a target audience to whichever ad pools it fits with. Of course, they probably already do this and I am just pulling shit out of my ass . Hey, love your drawings though! They always make me laugh, sometimes too cynically for my own good but there it is.
Posted by: Christine at February 28, 2004 11:46 PMBlogs can certainly be an advertising medium. Whether they can be a *mass* advertising medium is another matter.
Blogs are the next big Internet thing. I used to say "Everybody and their dog has a website!". Now, it may be "Everybody and thier dog has a blog!"
Back in the 1960s, SF writer Norman Spinrad ranted that there ought to be enough magazines and the like that *everyone* could get published. Now, via the wonders of technology and the Internet, eveyone *can* get published. The question is, who will read it? I can't agree with Henry's comment for that reason. Sure, anyone with a laptop and an ISP can publish on the Internet. Getting anyone else to *read* it is quite another matter.
Yes, you can advertise in blogs and draw traffic. The trick is the age old one of marketing: defining who your customer is and figuring out how to reach them. Which blogs attract what readers? How do I target X market? What do I have to offer them?
I see blog ads as an effective method of targeting niche markets with a specific message, based on the readership of the blog, but finding out who that readership is is a thornier proposition. Who reads your blog? What do you know about them? Can you provide demographics? Can you specify age/sex/income distribution? Most blogs can't. Those aren't questions they ask, nor do the posters generally care to answer if they are asked.
Is there a credibility and loyalty effect Christine mentions above? Perhaps, if the owner of the blog has any say over the ads that get placed. The vast majority of ads seem to be sold by the owner of the sites that host the blogs, and the blogger may have nothing to say about placement.
I don't see TV, newspapers, radio, billboards, and other ad forms going away any time soon. I *do* see a continuation of the trend that has been going on for some time, as advertisers search for greater effectiveness, and figure out that there may be better ways to spend the ad budget than 30 second spots on the Super Bowl.
______
Dennis
I agree with a lot of what you say, Dennis. Yeah, measuring one's effectiveness has always been a problem, as has targeting, as has getting good demographic feedback on one's website.
But there are ways. Depends on how determined you are.
Can I see an advertiser who, instead of blowing a million dollars on a Superbowl ad, opts for ten-thousuand dollar buys on 100 different blog? Or hundred-dollar buys on 10,000 different blogs? Certainly. The technology to set it up isn't that hard, theoretically.
The thing is: it's not about "blogs". It's about finding ever more sophisticated and cheaper ways to advertise. That's what the client is buying, regardless of media.
Posted by: hugh at March 1, 2004 10:38 PMAre you being entirely honest, though, about how advertising really functions?
Doesn't it have to tap into fantasies, desires, insecurities, etc. in a way that is maladapted to the blog medium?
I'm sure you're a great guy and all, but I just don't want to be you the way that millions of people would like to be Jennifer Aniston- or, at least, the JA we see after a cadre of people has prepped and scripted her, y'know?
Doesn't all that sort of lay the groundwork for an ad's efficacy?
Posted by: samantha at March 11, 2004 7:45 PMExcept that a blog environment has a potential to have the effectiveness of Mass Media advertising through adspace in the blog, and as Direct Marketing THROUGH the blog.
That is where I think the eltimate evolution of this concept will take us. Let's say Ford creates a blog for F-150 enthusiasts. Ford gets to take advantage of a DM setup with the added advantage of actually creating relationships with customers and potential customers--it's a cheap, effective way of creating buzz among a highly targeted audience for your new projects AND a simple way to gather highly targeted market research.
Plus, automotive accessory manufacturers, hunting/fishing/outdoors manufacturers and retailers, and probably a hundred other tpyes of companies can place an ad in an environment where easily 80 percent of its readership is in their target market as well. (Isn't that pretty much what happened with Hugh and AdRants?)
In this light, credibility and readability are going to be paramount concerns when companies set out to create a blog for self-promotion, as opposed to the "I wanna be like Jennifer Anniston" complexes driving the ad placement for TV.
Posted by: Danny at March 17, 2004 11:16 PMHm, hm, but aren't blogs successful just because they're NOT advertising but producing a kind of personal added value for the visitor? See Macromedia's blog-strategy f.e. having five of its "community managers" create their own weblogs. Providing a forum for the managers to discuss the new products, show developers how to use some of the new features and answer questions - all with a typical blogging-style, and no advertising approach at all. The dialogue itself is the advertising force behind…
Posted by: Roland Mueller at March 31, 2004 10:56 AMYeah, I think you're on to something there, Roland...
Posted by: hugh macleod at April 2, 2004 12:07 PMhugh, you're too close to the subject of advertising to see the big picture. You can't see the forest for the trees. Tobyz made a totally valid point.
"Audience" will never get to see the advertising on individual blog sites, exactly for the reason that tobyz states. Lack of exposure.
Who knows you're here? 20 or 30 people with an affinity to you or your topic and who have mrked the blog as a "Favorite". Maybe 100 or 200 others have found a link and clicked. If they don't bookmark the blog, they'll never find it again.
You are but one blog in a sea of blogs. If you have delivered even one "new" customer to an advertiser, you've beaten the average. Don't let that get you down. Even Budweiser, spending millions on SuperBowl ads, knows they get few "new" customers. They advertise only because they know they can't let the competition get their own ad exposure uncontested.
Disconnect 'advertising' from what tobyz said.
A typical blog has a handful of loyal fans. Aside from those few from a 9-figure internet audience, literally no one (statistically speaking) will ever find a clue that the blog exists.
Do you know the number of individuals who have ever found this blog ("unique" hits)? I betcha it will never get to 250. That's why tobyz's comment is right on.
So how did I find this site? I relax and waste time by looking at pages that a web randomizer pops up for me. There's no way I'll ever be able to find it again.
Posted by: charter at May 30, 2004 5:34 PMCharter, what are you saying? That one will never be able to buy large audience numbers via blogs?
People are already doing exatly that, though granted, the schtick is still in its infancy.
Posted by: hugh macleod at May 31, 2004 12:51 PM