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Federated Media has spent some time educating the ad industry on the power and potential of blogs and their authors.

Recently, they've been developing content that goes beyond the banner and utilizes their blog network. An interesting example of this is a recent campaign for Toshiba laptops that's been running on the FM Network, sites like Boing Boing.

It's a simple banner that allows you to ask a laptop question and get a reponse from experts or the community in general. The linkage to the brand's positioning is through the notion of "experts", Toshiba being the laptop experts.



Browse around the site and you will find answers to all kinds of laptop questions and importantly, they don't all "plug" Toshiba laptops.

It's an interesting idea and a good example of going beyond the banner to create a branded utility.

My only criticism of the idea is about its uniqueness. The problem for Toshiba is the web is awash with tips and advice for laptop owners or prospects, it's a hard area to "own".

However, the idea of link ad content to expert content is a really smart one and it's just a matter of time before someone does something amazingly creative and useful by linking the two together.


Posted by Ed Cotton A few months back Aki Spicer of Fallon and I presented at the AAAAs Account Planning Conference on the topic of ad agencies and blogging. We wet out and did a little bit of research to uncover what planners throught the advantages and disadvantages of blogs and blogging are. The presentation can be found below and it contains a pretty compelling argument on why agencies and their planners should be blogging.




Posted by Ed Cotton It appears that PR companies are way ahead of the curve in coming to terms with understanding bloggers as an important audience.

It's interesting to see what this means for media planners and buyers.

Are bloggers on media schedules?

Who is dealing with them?

Do they get forgetten about and left to the PR agency to handle?

If it's about doing more with blogs than running banners, then there's some potential overlap here.

Ogilvy PR recently took the unusual and important step of issuing a code of ethics that defines how they plan to work with bloggers.

• We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.
• We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea> for every social media campaign.
• We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and who we work for in our outreach email.
• Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.
• If you tell us there is a specific way you want to be reached, we’ll adhere to those guidelines.
• We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t.
• In our email we will convey why we think you, in particular, might be interested in our client’s product, issue, event or message.
• We won’t leave you hanging. If your contact at Ogilvy PR is going out of town or will be unreachable, we will provide you with an alternate point of contact.
• We encourage you to disclose our relationship with you to your readers, and will never ask you to do otherwise.
• You are entitled to blog on information or products we give you in any way you see fit. (Yes, you can even say you hate it.)
• If you don’t want to hear from us again, we will place you on our Do Not Contact list – which we will share with the rest of the Ogilvy PR agency.
• If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.
• Our initial outreach email will always include a link to Ogilvy PR’s Blog Outreach Code of Ethics.

It will be interesting to see what bloggers make of this.

Via Karl at Experience Curve


Posted by Ed Cotton Manager of Consumer-Generated Media is a similar role to Community Manager, but with a slightly differently title. Bruce Ertmann does this at Toytota, where he manages the blogs and montitors the webwaves for chatter and more.

"My office has a bank of 16 monitors and I sit in here, surf the Internet and drink 10 gallons of coffee a day. No, not really. Actually I have one computer, although I do spend a fair amount of time in the Internet, although not my entire day. I'd say I spend about 30% of my day there, which would include management of the Toyota blog and monitoring other blogs. My role is to integrate the use of consumer generated media into other areas of our corporate communications. For example, we work with marketing, using the information I might get to expand our audience, even for traditional pr events. We are broadening these to include influential bloggers and other media groups. We move in a lot of directions."

Via Brandweek




Posted by Ed Cotton Yesterday, Aki Spicer of Fallon and I presented this at the AAAA's Planning Conference.




The great news is we are already getting hate mail on Adpulp, from people who suggest they never surf the web for inspiration, then what the %^^& are they doing on Adpulp?

"Yes, while the creatives are busy working and MAKING sh*t happen...these 'cultural anthropologists' will be surfing the web and reposting what they find as 'insights' that try to validate their usefulness.

Give me a break."



Posted by Ed Cotton As the blog world fragments into more and more specialized universes, there comes a time when each of these universes has enough critical mass to matter.

The challenge is to monitor, track and direct people to relevant places within these worlds. For some time, Todd And has been the person collating and monitoring that information for the marketing space.

Todd’s “Power 150” has become the “Billboard Chart” for marketing bloggers.

Yesterday, Todd announced that he was joining forces with Advertising Age  . The ad trade giant will post the listing and perhaps even start using some of the bloggers featured on the list as sources for opinions and news.

It’s another example that shows how rapidly the walls are coming down between big media and the world of blogs.



Posted by Ed Cotton