Atlanta Media Bloggers

We are Bloggers, hear us roar?

Link: Blogs becoming force in advertising | Reuters.com.

Whoo hoo! How about this new research in the Reuters article below?

What does this mean, tho? My immediate thought is that there is a great warning embedded here. Take a study like this and mindlessly apply the results to your thinking, and shift the massive advertising persuasion push to blogs, and you risk killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

You see this happen all the time in television. They get a piece of research that says audiences like "X," and without thinking about WHY audiences like "X," they just turn around and run "X" into the ground, until audiences absolutely HATE "X."

So here's my logic. Advertising is wholeheartedly NOT persuasive. With emotional branding (pathos), it does OK, but audiences are far too savvy to expect advertising to be logical (logos), and most importantly, audiences have been conditioned over time to distrust the source (ethos).

Audiences DO trust close family and friends, word of mouth, MORE THAN ANYTHING.

Insofar as blogs appear to be as trustworthy as close family and friends, audiences will treat them on par with word of mouth recommendations.

However, if bloggers by and large sell out, or if the trust/credibility link-love system fails, if scam-blogs and splogs proliferate and drown out all the signal for their noise, the truths of this study will evaporate as surely as people stopped believing the boy who cried wolf.

It always amazes me how business these days takes a scorched earth approach in pursuit of profit, instead of looking at how longevity and trust matter more than quarterly returns. I mean, what self-respecting capitalist would actually hype a lie or corrupt a source that reaches an actual audience (what should we call blogging payola? blogola?) if it means destroying his or her own future customer base or ability to reach that customer base?

What this research tells me is that when given a choice, people choose authenticity. Sales pitches don't feel authentic, so they are disregarded. Blogs feel authentic, so they are tentatively trusted. Those who promote rampant pitching without regard for authenticity will probably rush in and exploit this source.

Will authenticity be strong enough to win, or will the pitches drive the real audience out of the blogosphere?

Link: Blogs becoming force in advertising�| Reuters.com.

Blogs becoming force in advertising

Fri Nov 10, 2006 7:27pm ET

 

LONDON (Reuters) - Blogs are becoming a force to be reckoned with as a means of advertising products, according to a survey.

An Ipsos MORI poll found that the Internet journals are a more trusted source of information than TV advertising or e-mail marketing.

[...]

Ipsos MORI found a direct link between blogs, or user-generated content, and people's intentions to buy goods or services.

Any company that fails to come up to standard should beware. The blog is replacing word of mouth for endorsing or condemning a product or service.

[...]

Blogs, or weblogs, are a more trusted source of information (24 percent) than television advertising (17 percent) and email marketing (14 percent), the survey commissioned by Hotwire, a technology public relations consultancy, said.

But they still lag behind newspapers (30 percent).

[...]

"Word of mouth is no longer restricted to close friends and family, it can have the same level of influence upon millions of people across the world."

Should interactive media be doing a better job of managing expectations?

First, this article just struck me as counter-intuitive, because all the numbers have been running high precisely in the opposite direction.

Then, I wondered if it is linked to the expectations game, the land-rush mentality that turned the Internet into Oklahoma in the late 1990s, with ripe money poised at the border, wanting to be a Sooner.

The money rushes in, the money rushes out, all because interactive media won't immediately transform itself into a push-button marketing free cash bonanza? Like with old media companies, will a slower than 28% growth spawn a shareholder exodus?

That sounds too easy, tho, given the massive Ford cutbacks announced recently.

And why is there a decline in financial advert money? Mortgage market slump? Too soon, or is it? Why would one of the most profitable industries in U.S history (credit industry) back off? I know there's a mortgage adjustment going on, but could there be a trimming back on consumer credit too? Larger economic trends that capital gains and investment machinations of the super-rich can't disguise?

Hey, don't ask me. I'm not a broker. I just know Yahoo! has had an aggressive and intensely creative year, and it surprised me more often than once in the past year, with interesting content and interactivity plays. Generally, I'd consider that a good thing. I dunno. Maybe Yahoo! was sucking in some more traditional old media investors, and they got cold feet quick.

Link: Yahoo Says Ad Growth Is Slowing; Stock Dives - New York Times.

Yahoo Says Ad Growth Is Slowing; Stock Dives

By SAUL HANSELL

Published: September 19, 2006

Shares of  Yahoo fell more than 11 percent today after the company disclosed that it had sold less advertising in the last few weeks than it expected, largely because of a slowdown in automobile and financial advertising.

Speaking to a conference held in New York by  Goldman Sachs, Terry S. Semel, Yahoo’s chief executive, said that while advertising continued to grow from these industries, “they’re not growing as quickly as we might have hoped at this point in time.”

Yahoo said that it would still meet its financial targets for the third quarter, but that its profit and revenue will be toward the bottom of the range it had estimated.

[...]

The bottom of that range represents a 20 percent growth in revenue and a 16 percent growth on operating cash flow.

That would represent a further slowing of Yahoo’s growth. In the second quarter its revenue grew by 28 percent. And that result was lower than analysts expected, causing the company’s shares to slide. Over the summer, Yahoo’s stock had regained all of that loss until today’s disclosure.

[...]

Still, Wall Street analysts said it appeared that Yahoo’s problems were  not widespread in the industry.

“Not everything is hunky-dory in Yahoo land,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. “Yahoo’s audience is not growing as fast as it once did.” Mr. Rohan added that Yahoo appeared to have unusual turnover among its executives and that this might have hurt its ability to sell advertising.

Susan Decker, Yahoo’s chief financial officer, told the investors that the advertising slowdown affected both text-based search advertising and graphical display advertising, an area in which Yahoo is the leader.

[...]

Polluting The Blogosphere?

Link: Business Week: Polluting The Blogosphere.

What do y'all think about issues of disclosure with potential conflicts of interest? I have an essay on blogging and transparency (and other things) coming out in the Montana Journalism Review, so I have strong opinions on the subject, but folks on this list have closer ties to the people who might make "product placement mentions" in blogs their explicit goal.

So paid placements are an issue about disclosure, but what about unpaid placements?

I have a blog entry that does a riff off that wacky IBM commercial where all kinds of people sing "I'm not like everybody else"... all mouthing the words to the song recording... IN UNISON (the point being, if you're not like everybody else, why would you be singing in exact unison with everybody else?!).

In other words, it is a negative take on the ad, pointing up the absurdity of contradicting the ad's message in the visual images of the ad. But in doing so, it mentions the ad in detail (and several others that use visual puns).

Many of us know the PR maxim that there's no such thing as bad press. The statistics on my blog bear it out. Can you believe that it is one of my highest hit pages on the site? Not because people are just dying to read my analysis of that ad (I refuse to believe that), but my guess is these are mostly crawlers and marketing research brand monitors put out into the blogosphere to track product mentions in the hopes that, oh, bloggers will just start spontaneously talking about products incessantly, to the exclusion of anything else. I know that's all I want to read, right? [grin]

But if I want to pump my stats (but not real readers), I might have incentive to play the product "name drop" game.

Anyway, I thought I would throw the topic open to discussion, since many of us straddle different loyalties on these issues.

Link: Business Week: Polluting The Blogosphere.

MEDIA CENTRIC

Polluting The Blogosphere

Bloggers are getting paid to push products. Disclosure is optional

JULY 10, 2006

Jon Fine

 

"You can't believe anything you see or read," complains Ted Murphy. "You think those judges on American Idol want to drink those giant glasses of Coke?"

It's funny to hear him say this because Murphy, who founded a Tampa-based interactive ad agency called MindComet, also runs a side business that pays bloggers to write nice things about corporate sponsors -- without unduly worrying about whether or not bloggers disclose these arrangements to readers. (A scan of relevant blog searches strongly suggests that, often, they don't.)

Murphy is launching PayPerPost.com, which will automate such hookups between advertisers and bloggers and thus codify a new frontier of product placement. Advertisers pay to post details about their "opportunity," specifying, among other things, how they want bloggers to write about, say, a new shoe, if they want photos to be included, and whether they'll pay only for positive mentions. Bloggers who abide by the rules get paid; heavily trafficked blogs may command premium rates. Those seeking to subvert PayPerPost from within can't: No pornographic or "illicit" content is accepted.

[...]

IT'S BETTER FOR A BRAND to get into a blog than to surround it as a banner or text ad, says Murphy. Unlike ads, blog posts live on in search engines and through links from other sites. "A couple thousand" bloggers have participated in Blogstar Network, he says. As for disclosure, "it's up to [bloggers] to be their own morality police," he says.

There are Old Media types who will use PayPerPost to dump on the credibility of all bloggers, and there are bloggers ready to seize on Murphy's point to trash traditional media. I enjoy a rhetorical race to the bottom as much as the next guy, but both views are deluded.

[...]

But media today is so cynical that you have to come out and say that shilling without disclosure is a bad idea.

[...]

Thanks in no small part to bloggers, this is an era of increased media transparency, and many shifty dealings between the business and editorial sides have been exposed. Recently The Wall Street Journal reported that advertiser-produced video segments have shown up on local news shows. My colleague Eamon Javers unmasked pundits whose op-ed page pieces touted initiatives from corporations that paid them. An undisclosed PayPerPost placement on a little-seen blog isn't the most egregious thing out there, but it's far from honest. Media may be more transparent, but the line between authentic editorial and paid placement is still often smeared, and defenders of disclosure can feel, like the proverbial buggy whip company, that they're terribly outmoded. Things being what they are, I should mention that no buggy whip association paid me to say that.

For Jon Fine's blog on media and advertising, go to www.businessweek.com/innovate/FineOnMedia
 

Poynter Online on 2006 Online Eyeball Studies from Nielsen-Norman

Link: Poynter Online - E-Media Tidbits Pt 1.

Friday, June 23, 2006

Posted by Laura  Ruel 7:25:08 AM

Text Ads Get the Most Looks

Here at the Nielsen/Norman Group's Usability Week in San Francisco, Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice Coyne yesterday presented results from their first use of eyetracking to evaluate Web design.

Similar to the results in Poynter's Eyetrack III study, their research on ads shows that people do not look at static ads with graphic treatment.

Users seem to "zone out" (with their peripheral vision) ads and other site elements that have clearly distinguishable ad features such as graphics and colors that make the ads look different from the rest of the site, or animated ads.

Nielsen/Norman's study found that people spend, on average, less than one second viewing display/graphical treatment ads. Users did look at animated ads when they preceded content and were forced. However, in these cases the user had nothing else to view.

[...]

When users DO look at ads with graphics, those ads usually have:

• Heavy use of large, clear text
• A color scheme that matches the site's style
• Attention-grabbing proprieties such as black text on a white background, words such as "free" and interactive (UI) elements.

Here's a follow up of what came out of the conference...

Link: Poynter Online - E-Media Tidbits Pt 2.

Friday, June 23, 2006
Posted by Laura  Ruel 11:25:09 AM

What Makes Web Images Attractive

More from the Nielsen/Norman Group's Usability Week in San Francisco. (Previous coverage) Yesterday Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice Coyne presented the results of their first use of eyetracking to evaluate Web design.

They offered one interesting and much-discussed observation: Task-oriented users really don't pay attention to images on Web pages.

[...]

Both Eyetrack III and the NNG study found that faces in images tend to attract users' focus. NNG mentioned to the dangers of using images as "an obstacle course." Images that appear unnecessary, at least peripherally, can be erroneously tuned out.

According to NNG, images that do NOT attract attention share these traits:

• Generic/stock art
• Off-putting, cold, fake, too polished or "set up"
• Not related to content
• Look like advertisements
• Low contrast in terms of color -- not crisp

Meanwhile, images that DO get attention share these traits:

• Related to page content
• Clearly composed and appropriately cropped
• Contain "approachable" people who are smiling, looking at the camera, not models
• Show areas of personal/private anatomy (Men tended to fixate on these areas more than women -- really!)
• Items a user may want to buy.