ChasNote

FM partner Piers Fawkes and I had an email conversation today about Google’s site-specific ad program versus Federated Media’s approach to working directly with brand marketers. Piers posted part of the thread at his site, PSFK, and did the math on the revenues he’s making from Google selling ads on his site directly: A $0.30 CPM.

Piers proposes that “if you’re an advertiser it might be a great time to rape and pillage as many bloggers as possible.” But I’m not sure the blame is properly placed on the advertisers. Google lets each site set its own price, so advertisers are just paying what the publisher provides as an “acceptable” rate.

Further, I worry that the Google approach — taking humans and creative brainstorming out of the mix — robs the advertising process of value for both buyers and sellers. Obviously, $0.30 versus $13 is a bad deal for a high-value publisher like PSFK. And if ad buyers reward cheapness over impact, we will never again see break-through marketing that accomplishes anything beyond direct-response calls to action.  Some of the early forays into “conversational marketing” that have come through FM in the past year — Dice’s Rant Banner or Symantec’s RSS-powered content ad or Cisco’s Human Network campaign, to name a few — still aren’t possible via Google’s self-service platform.