Seth Godin has an odd — though perhaps too common — encounter with the robots that are building ad networks all over the internet. The robots in question, in this case, are employed by Forbes.
“A woman named Jennifer Rosini at Forbes sent a note that read:
Hi , You are invited to join the new community of the high quality business and financial bloggers from Forbes.com. Our community - the Business and Financial Blog Network, will launch shortly.
“I wrote her back, pointing out that she hadn’t even bothered to pretend it was a personal note… just a mail merge missing my name.
“She responded (this is the entire note):
I’m not sending these out. I have people working for me that send out 500 a day. Are you interested in joining, Seth?
“The juxtaposition of the third sentence with the second just highlighted the inanity of the entire enterprise. It’s a high-quality network, but 500 people a day are being asked to join, and it’s okay to spam people but do I want to join anyway?”
“The end result of spam (email spam, blog spam, Twitter spam, Squidoo spam, comment spam, phone spam, politician spam) is that it eats away at your brand. If you don’t have a brand, you might make some short term cash but it gets tiresome creating annoyance everywhere you go. If you do have a brand, a brand like Forbes, say, you don’t notice the brand erosion… until it’s too late.”
Needless to say, brand marketers don’t want to be associated with distressed brands — so what’s the point of this approach?
The new ads for Dell’s ReGeneration.org are in-page videos formatted to fit inside a 300×250-pixel ad zone.
Sure, I know, you’ve seen that before. But if you look closer, there’s more.
The text overlay at the top of the video player is content that continually refreshes via ReGeneration.org’s RSS feed. You can read it there on the video player or, by clicking on the orange RSS button, subscribe to it as a new channel in your RSS reader. And you can click on “More” if you want to share it, download it, or embed it.
Super cool.
Credits: Andrew Bowins and the Dell crew; James Gross, Jonathan Schreiber, Ben Roodman and Matt Jessell at FM; and the Synapse Group.
Dell taps Techdirt’s Insight Community on a project that’s somewhere between a virtual focus group and a sponsored forum. As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick puts it:
“we’ve put together a site, sponsored by Dell, on The Future of Storage, which is powered by the Techdirt Insight Community. We’re building an ongoing conversation around the future direction of the storage market. You can join in the conversation itself just by heading straight to the site and commenting on the posts, but if you have experience with storage area network technology, you should join the community itself and submit your insight on where you think the market is heading. The best insights not only get published to the site, but can earn you quite a bit of money. Basically, you can be smart, earn a bunch of money and get recognition for being smart all in one shot. Tough to beat that. “
At the same time Dell has partnered with Ars Technica to sponsor the roll out of Ars Technica’s first-ever enterprise IT forum, The Server Room — “a dedicated place where discussion could take place around IT matters of interest to business and enterprise gurus”. Full transparency provided by Ars’s Ken Fisher:
“Effective immediately, we are opening The Server Room to the public (registration is required for posting access). We are proud to announce that Dell is sponsoring the launch of this new resource, and I encourage you to visit our sponsor, Dell’s The Future of Storage: ‘Insights into the rapidly evolving storage area network market.’”
RadioShack’s Innovation Lab campaign (more here), with banner ads that invite geeky do-it-yourselfers to collaborate on robotic and electronics projects, is reaching some influential skeptics that are committed to ignoring advertising. At the No Revolution blog, a site dedicated to “Clear-minded postings about the oft over-hyped advertising convergence,” tells how he became engaged in the program:
“They’re asking people to upload project ideas and fostering community. Nicely done. I found this by clicking an ad banner (e-gad!) on boingboing — the gadget site — because my good friend and UXD expert Mike Brooks sent me a video link. So, there you have it. Social interaction leads to spontaneous discovery leads to brand renewal for an ‘old’ retail brand. There’s hope for this whole ‘Net’ thing after all.”
My colleague Lester Lee sums it up well:
“This is a sick campaign. You’re talking about a guy who belongs to a techie/savvy demographic who probably never clicks on ads (out of principle) that likes a campaign so much he blogs about it.
“This is probably the only way Radio Shack will ever reach this demographic through marketing — not through banners (they have AdBlock), not through TV (he’s got DVR), and hell not even through movie theater advertising (hello, BitTorrent).”
Among yesterday’s coverage of FM’s Series C financing was this post by Avenue A’s SVP for global media Jeff Lanctot, including his take on working with FM.
“I can say that FM has established a nice track record with Avenue A | Razorfish (my employer) over the last several quarters. Looking back to 2007, we spent nearly 4X more with FM in the second half of the year than we did in the first half. In the first quarter of 2008, our spend with FM matched all of calendar year 2007. Granted, FM started from a small base in 2007, but this kind of growth isn’t common. Looking at the reasons for their success, I think FM has done three things very well:
“1. They are clear about what they do. They don’t pretend to be an ad network. In this interview with Rafat, John says “We don’t view ourselves as an ad network…ad networks are our cousins. We have a portfolio of brands that we represent and partner with, so we consider ourselves a digital media and publishing company. Our next phase is to help those brands grow.” That’s smart positioning, because I don’t think there is room for many more ad networks.
“2. They treat every campaign as a unique opportunity. The FM team is quite genuine about providing custom solutions that work for readers, authors and advertisers. This tends to be a labor-intensive approach, so I’m not sure how well it scales. But marketers love thoughtful, integrated, on-brand ideas. FM has lots of them.”
You’ll have to visit Jeff’s site to get his third point.
Disclosure: Jeff is a pal, a client and — now more than ever — a handsome and powerful man.
The editorial staff at ChasNote was disappointed to learn this does not mean they will be traveling first class to investigative-reporting boondoggles.
Last week RadioShack and DIY mag Make teamed up on the Innovation Lab site, which invites technically inclined visitors to “Share project ideas, completed projects and project horror stories for your chance to win a $250 RadioShack gift certificate.” One idea that’s racking up votes is a build-it-yourself lie detector. Uh oh, the editorial team at ChasNote better shape up!
“The 32-year-old at-home mother’s irreverent, occasionally profane and often hilarious musings on prosaic topics from potty-training to postpartum depression have propelled her blog, Dooce.com, to No. 59 among the Web’s top 100 blogs, according to Technorati, a blog search engine. The Salt Lake City resident enjoys enviable influence and enough ad revenue that her husband Jon quit his job in 2005 to manage advertising for Dooce (rhymes with moose).”
Earlier this week Intel and Ars Technica teamed up on a new technology forum, one designed specifically to engage Intel engineers, tech leaders from companies such as Google and Rambus, tech journalists from Ars Technica and Real World Technologies, and the tech power-set that makes up the Ars Technica community — all in one place. Dozens of individual topics have sparked hundreds of posts from the Ars community, which have been read by thousands of others.
Separate from the conversations around visual computing and multi-core architectures, Jon Stokes, directing editor at Ars Technica, reached out to his readers for feedback on the concept. Is it OK to invite engineers from Intel — the sponsor — into an Ars forum? Here’s an excerpt of that conversation.
Reader: “Seriously, let’s not pretend that Intel’s sponsorship isn’t going to affect how the forum is moderated and beyond”
Jon Stokes’s reply is pretty convincing:
As Stokes suggests, the proof is in the pudding. This program only works for Intel if it also works for Ars, and it only works for Ars if it works for the Ars community. Since that’s all out on the table — and the community is watching — it’s hard to imagine the Ars Technica editors could let this conversation veer into an advertorial Intel pep rally. Partnerships work best when all the parties have skin in the game. I’m betting this partnership is going to work well.
Credits: Intel’s David Veneski, Universal McCann’s Kerri Vickers, Ars Technica’s Jon Stokes and Ken Fisher, and FM’s Josh Mattison and Jason Ratner put this sponsorship together.
