ChasNote

The voice post technology arrives just in time for John Battelle at Searchblog, who broke one of his typing hands last week at camp with the kids. I know what you’re thinking — I made him break his hand as part of the HP sponsorship deal, but, alas, I didn’t.  Also, Ken Fisher at Ars Technica debuts his site’s voice post series with a review of Tivo HD.

Earlier this week, several FM sites rolled out their first “voice posts,” a new series of editorial segments served up as audio files on blog sites. HP is the sponsor of the series, meaning their logo appears under the audio file with copy that says “voice post technology sponsored by HP iPaq 510.” HP also bought banner ads on the sites. Beyond that, though, HP has no relationship to or influence over the content of the voice posts — a brilliant stroke on their part. Why? Two reasons.

First, by giving blog authors a new, easy-to-use platform to talk to their readers (listeners?) about topics of their own choosing, HP stands a much better chance of creating a “voice post habit” among top independent bloggers. Mark Frauenfelder, for example, one of Boing Boing’s editors, reads an excerpt from his book, “The World’s Worst.” According to Amazon, the paperback edition is 176 pages long. If Mark gets good feedback from Boing Boing readers, he’s got a lot more book to read — in his own voice! — for voice-posting on the site. Not that HP’s logo will necessarily accompany hundreds of future voice posts on Boing Boing (their current sponsorship runs for 2 months); but presumably the HP and the iPaq brands benefit if more bloggers and more online media consumers get comfortable with voice-to-text and text-to-voice activities.

Second, not every visitor to these sites will understand what’s meant by “voice post technology sponsored by HP iPaq 510.” So David Ponce at OhGizmo used a voice post to explain to his audience exactly what HP paid for (ads on his site and the HP logo under voice posts), and what they didn’t (his editorial content). Transparency and full disclosure, never bad things, are enormously important practices for independent publishers (who tend to face greater, or at least more vocal, scrutiny than traditional publishers, see this or this) and for publishers exploring marketing that goes beyond standard ad banners. And while HP didn’t pay OhGizmo to write or “voice” a disclosure, they benefited from it: It’s impossible for an author to disclose a sponsorship relationship without naming the involved sponsor. In OhGizmo’s case, David mentions HP or iPaq five times in the voice post and another five times in the accompanying text post, both under the headline “Voice Posts On OhGizmo: An Explanation, A Disclaimer And An Example.”

Nice going, HP.

(Disclosure: FM represents OhGizmo and Boing Boing and takes a commission on advertising that runs on those sites, and I work for FM.)

Update 7/24: The voice post technology arrives just in time for John Battelle at Searchblog, who broke one of his typing hands last week at camp with the kids. I know what you’re thinking — I made him break his hand as part of the HP sponsorship deal, but, alas, I didn’t. Also, Ken Fisher at Ars Technica debuts his site’s voice post series with a review of Tivo HD.

Update 7/31: Boing Boing uses voice posts to add the soundtrack to their site.

Update 8/14: As voice posts add to content, readers demand access. Here’s what the editors at Boing Boing are doing about it, according to David Pescovitz.

Update 8/31: HP marketing staffer and blogger Tac Anderson asks the question, Is This Really Advertising?, to which he replies:

“Technically yes. The better answer is that this is the way new media advertising *should* be done. It leverages ad dollars to bring additional value to a community that is not interruptive. I don’t know who on the HP side came up with this but I think it’s great.”

Update 9/15: Here’s a handful of comments from readers of Battelle’s Searchblog.

Nick Carr’s recent column for Guardian Unlimited is called, “How corporations still control the marketing conversation.”

I like the implied admission that these conversations — what we used to call publications — are controlled at some level by the corporations who pay the bills through advertising. (Excluding, of course, Ms Magazine and Consumer Reports.) Hey, admitting the problem is a great place to start! He even turns the mirror on his own sector of the media business:

“Even in traditional media, the line dividing marketing and editorial content has long been a blurry one. Many newspapers and magazines publish in their pages advertorials written by companies, even though they know that many readers don’t distinguish the paid content from the articles written by journalists.”

But, ironically, he concludes with this:

“It has long been assumed that the internet, by democratising media, would level the playing field, shifting power away from corporations and to individuals. A lone person, using a computer and a web connection, could broadcast his opinion about a company or a product to the entire world. There’s truth in that, but it’s not the whole truth. As the line between media and marketing blurs further, corporations are finding that the web may give them more power to influence what people see and do. In the end, conversational marketing is more about marketing than about conversation.”

When the NY Times let ATT wallpaper the print pages of the business section in January 2007, horrified readers didn’t have an easy channel to voice their feedback. Or when it has launched new sections of the newspaper — such as Automobiles or Small Business — not because there was suddenly more news about those topics, but because advertisers would pay the Times more if they wrote more stories on those topics, there was no forum for public discussion. When the Wall Street Journal promoted Dell advertorial videos as video news coverage (with another tech vendor’s commercials running before and after the advertorial, to make the ruse complete!) the traditional journalists at the Journal and its competitors looked the other way. When CNET, ZDNet, PC Magazine, CNN, Fortune, or Car and Driver have lent their voices, words, logos and names to advertisers for use in ad creative — it’s something we consumers just have to deal with, quietly.

When websites — especially the new generation of “conversational” sites that , oh my!, make it easy for their readers to express themselves right there in the publications (attached to the story itself, not on page 28 where “letters to the editor” are hidden) — explore more relevant approaches to advertising, they DO open themselves up for criticism, actively. They invite it, in fact, because they recognize their survival depends on listening to reader feedback and improving from it. Conversational media and conversational marketing certainly “level the playing field” and “shift the power away from corporations” more than old school media and marketing ever has. It ain’t perfect yet, but it’s a move in the right direction.

I like to consider myself an expert on sniffing out advertiser messages among editorial content. But today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal’s MEDIA AND MARKETING EDITION newsletter has me stumped!

The email arrives daily with “WSJ.com Editors” in the From field, and most of the links are to editorial stories — so I’ve always pegged this an editorial product. There are advertising links, which are generally marked as such. Today’s first link is one of those: “Advertising: Dell is rolling out a TV, print and online ad campaign aimed at promoting its new line of colorful notebook computers, the company’s latest step to jump-start lagging sales,” just above the link to the Dell ad.

The second story, though, is marked “WSJ Video” but also says it’s an invitation to watch a Dell commercial: “WSJ Video: Watch an ad for Dell’s new line of notebook computers.” When I followed the link to the WSJ.com site and watched the videos, they appear to be advertorials or what PR firms used to call “video news releases.” Toward the end of the video segment, text in the video window announced the content was provided “courtesy of Dell via Beam TV” — aha! It’s an ad! But before and after the segment, the screen filled up with the WSJ Online logo along with text that said “presented” by WSJ. And the WSJ logo ran as a watermark over the video the whole time (like CNN or MSNBC does over their own news footage, but not commercials on those networks), and nothing on the website or player window (nothing I could find, anyway) disclosed that it was sponsored or advertising content — though WSJ did post a disclosure on the player window while traditional Cisco video ads ran before and after the Dell advertorial.

Wait a second! The WSJ crew convinced Cisco to run commercials around Dell commercials! (Assuming those Dell videos are, in fact, commercials.) The entire ad-sales team here at ChasNote is humbled. Wow.

I spent last Friday evening at LAX and the Burbank airport (and trafficky freeways between the two) on a 9 hour quest to get back to San Francisco. Lucky for me, I found myself distracted by an engaging and spirited discussion of advertising models, journalistic ethics and best practices for conversational marketing! A week later I find myself, again, stuck in Los Angeles waiting out flight delays — and collecting my thoughts on last week’s hoopla around conversational marketing.

Earlier this week I had a frank conversation with the folks at Microsoft to get their take. After revisiting the elements of the ad campaign, we agreed that this sort of “conversational marketing” doesn’t violate ethics (marketer or journalistic) or intentionally mislead readers. Still, they are taking seriously the perception among some commentators that we all could have done more to disclose the details on the campaign. More transparency can’t be a bad thing. Most importantly, Microsoft is listening and trying to learn from the feedback. I was thrilled to hear all of that.

That’s what makes conversational marketing so compelling to me (and my colleagues at FM) — it allows our customers to give us feedback. Honest feedback isn’t always nice to hear, but it’s important that we hear it, that we listen and that we grow from it. We’ll keep at it because we’re committed to finding more relevant, natural ways to communicate to our customers, and (let’s hope) we get better each time.

Anil Dash, Chief Evangelist at Six Apart and among the folks credited with launching the blog movement (here’s his bio), added this to the discussion of conversational marketing:

“There’s been a (mostly boring) conversation going between some blogs over the past few days regarding the line between editorial and advertising. Largely, this is a case of the same silly-meme-into-faux-fact path that I tried to document yesterday. In this case, it’s a little lessinnocent — Nick Denton used a Valleywag blog post to take a jab at John Battelle and FM Pub by implying its writers sold out by creating copy for a Microsoft campaign that ran on their sites.

“The whole thing is, as I said, mostly boring, except that the idea of the post is what ended up being debated, instead of the fact that this is really a case of a not-that-serious personal rivalry turning into an assault on the credibility of a number of good bloggers. And a number of overrated ones, but that’s beside the point.

“Again with the disclaimers: I know both Nick and John, and like them both for what they’re good at, as well as for what makes them different. And I have good friends in both of their companies. This isn’t name-dropping; A big part of my job is making connections to people who do innovative things with blogs and in the blogging industry, and they both fall squarely into that description.

“But Nick is being pretty transparently intellectually dishonest here — throwing bombs at John and FM not because he believes what he’s saying, but because he knows it’ll get attention. The idea of advertising becoming more blog-like is a good thing. If every ad were written by an actual human, had a permanent link to its location, and let people share or tag it, we’d end up with a radically better advertising culture.

“The idea of a media team creating advertising content isn’t new — it’s as old as publishing itself. And it continues today. Here’s Ziff Davis’ Contract Publishing services. In public media, here’s PBS’ Red Book guidelines for underwriting content. Sure, it makes sense to have different teams be responsible for money and editorial. But in blogging, where the editor is the publisher and you can’t split a one-person staff in half, merging these functions isn’t just logical, it’s inevitable. Perhaps if Nick hadn’t been a pioneering blogger himself, I’d have believed he was simply mistaken.

“In this case, though, we’re fortunate to have some pretty articulate advocates for the idea of conversational marketing. For example, FM Pub’s Chas Edwards does a great job of telling the story (link).

“But perhaps the best advocate for this style of conversational marketing is Nick Denton. From three years ago…..”

In Anil’s post, he’s pulled material from Gawker Media’s own media kit from 3 years ago, including the offer to “provide editorial talent and oversight” and the statement that “campaign weblogs allow a marketer to participate in the weblog conversation, rather than observe it as a passive sponsor.”

I think Nick and I agree more than I thought!

Over the past 2 years, FM has worked with dozens of advertisers and 100+ leading independent authors, editors and publishers in an effort to give readers and marketers a better opportunity to talk to each other. We call it “conversational marketing.”

The idea is simple. The best publications have always been dialogs between great writers, passionate readers, and, yes, advertisers. This “conversation” is more obvious and more iterative among today’s social media communities, but it’s been happening since long before the Internet. The most successful advertisers have always been the ones that recognize and respect this conversation — rather than those who see media as a “delivery platform” for their pitch or an opportunity to “target their demo.” Advertisers that license New Yorker cartoons for their print ads in that publication, Wired advertisers that write ad copy in the definitive grammar of that publication, and tech advertisers that re-use in their ad units favorable reviews from CNET and PC Magazine are three examples.

To be clear, I’m not talking about advertorials; I’m talking about ads, those things that every human over the age of 7 recognizes as paid messages from a marketer. Provided publishers follow two long-standing guidelines — be transparent, listen to reader feedback — advertisers can join the conversation without tainting anyone’s credibility.

During the 1990s hey-days of tech magazines, readers of PC Magazine and PC World said they spent as much time with the ads as they did the editorial content. And that’s not because IT professionals are so dumb they can’t tell the difference (please!) — it’s because ads that work hard to join the conversation, to be relevant to participants in that conversation, are more valuable than generic ads that attempt to interrupt the conversation and steal your attention for half a minute.

This is all to say: I’m a believer that highly relevant advertising — advertising that joins the conversation — is better for all involved parties.

So I took issue with Nick Denton’s Friday post on ValleyWag accusing some of the web’s most highly respected, most experienced professional journalists of selling out their credibility to help Microsoft bring more relevant ads to their readers.

One of Microsoft’s marketing messages is built around the phrase “people ready,” and the equation “software + people = business success.” It’s a mouthful, and — to me, anyway — not immediately digestible. So, working with FM, Microsoft invited 8 FM authors to talk about the concept of “people ready” in their own words, in language that might resonate better with their readers. What those authors wrote was featured in the campaign that ensued.

Did Microsoft ask the authors to endorse their brand, use their products, or tell their readers what to do? Of course not.

Did Microsoft or these journalist try to sneak these ads past their readers, in a costume of editorial or even advertorial? Nope. Microsoft paid for ad impressions, and the rates for advertising on each of these sites is published at FM’s website. Quite obviously, Microsoft was running paid ads on their sites. John Battelle took the added measure of blogging about his participation in the campaign (see Searchblog) — and that’s a great idea to make the self-evident even more evident!

Did readers get confused by what they were looking at in those ad banners? Well, Cisco did something similar last fall, around their “Welcome to the Human Network” campaign. A dozen leading tech and business journalists affiliated with FM wrote their own definitions of “human network” that they let Cisco use in ad banners on their sites. Like Microsoft, Cisco didn’t guide or edit or participate in the copy written by these journalists. And readers seemed OK with the project. Thousands of them clicked on the Cisco ads to read more definitions and voted on their favorites. Nearly 900 of them went back to their own blogs and wrote up the experience (not all were positive reviews, but most were). The Wikipedians added “human network” as entry to their encyclopedia, and made reference to Cisco’s “commercial use of the phrase,” so the distinction between advertising and editorial was clear to them, too. And for the past 2 months — the Microsoft campaign started running on these sites in April — readers of those sites haven’t raised an outcry.

So there’s a fair amount of evidence Denton is raising a stink all by himself. Or perhaps his disdain for the advertisers that support his business (Gawker Media), our business (Federated Media), and every other ad-supported content business online or offline, is so great that he feels they don’t belong in the conversation at all. Except, of course, the conversation in which they agree to pay him, then shut up. At FM, we think that — for commercially supported sites, anyway — marketers might just have something to add to the conversation. And we’ll keep working on innovative ways for them to do just that.

Other coverage:

Robert Scoble at Scobleizer.
Fred Wilson at AVC.
Mike Arrington at TechCrunch.
Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web.
Don Park at Daily Habit.
Neil Chase at FM’s blog.
John Battelle at FM’s blog.
Om Malik at GigaOM.
Paul Kedrosky at Infectious Greed.

Zach Rodgers at ClickZ wrote up Ask.com’s experience with their Ask A Ninja sponsorship:

“Question: What do you get when you cross a ninja with one of those live-read radio sponsorships of old — you know, the ad spots news hosts and celebs used to read on-air?

“Answer: Ask.com’s latest digital ad initiative.

“The IAC/InterActiveCorp-owned search engine has paired with goofball video blog Ask a Ninja on an ad deal in which the show’s host and namesake reads the sponsor copy himself — and then offers bonus clips to fans who query Ask with special ninja-themed search terms. The three-month relationship, which also includes run-of-site display ads, was brokered by Ask a Ninja rep Federated Media Publishing….”

“Early response rates are good. In the first two weeks of the campaign, 8.3 percent of viewers have searched on Ask.com’s ninja-related terms and watched the videos.

“‘There isn’t advertising that is able to drive that kind of response rate,’ said [ChasNote’s own] Chas Edwards, chief revenue officer at FM Publishing. ‘But there certainly is opportunity around the ninja to drive that response rate around himself and his content’ by incorporating a call to action and a pay off that takes place within the search experience.”

Thanks for the coverage, Zach!

Late Thursday night, video-podcaster (and FM partner) Ask A Ninja rolled out the first episode in a series of nine that will be sponsored by Ask.com as part of their recent re-branding campaign. At the end of each episode, the Ninja invites his viewers to go to Ask.com (by clicking on an Ask.com banner alongside the video window, or by going straight to Ask.com) and to enter a made-up word. The Ninja tells viewers who do this that they’ll get either the definition of “ninjuice” (via a custom video skit by the Ninja), or — so threatens the Ninja — a sword in the head.

The campaign is smart at one (very simple) level in that it ties together banner ads with integrated, co-branded messages in the video programming. At another level, it’s even smarter in that the Ninja (the featured act) rather than Ask.com (the marketer) makes the call-to-action.

The data from the campaign’s first 20 hours are astounding. One out of every twelve viewers of the Ninja’s “Ninja Sayings” video skit went to Ask.com, queried “ninjuice” and watched the bonus video that the Ninja produced especially for those “certified search ninjas” who completed the assignment. An 8.3% rate of conversion. For comparison, imagine a conventional banner that delivers a terrific click-through rate, say 0.4%. Then assume a whopping 25% of those clickers actually test-drive the product. Even that record-breaking performance would add up to only a 0.1% rate of conversion. The team effort by Ask.com and Ask A Ninja did 83 TIMES better.

Digital marketing has become a martial art!

This concept was a collaboration of FM’s James Gross and Ask’s Sean X Cummings.

More coverage at GigaOM’s NewTeeVee, Clickz (twice) and AdRants.

Update 5/28/07: Ninjuice has made its way to Wikipedia.

Brightcove’s founder and CEO, speaking at MediaPost’s “Outfront” conference in New York last week, adds to the chorus of online video veterans forecasting the death of the :15 pre-stream ads. Instead he proposes a medley of models — shorter pre-stream units, mid-stream commericals, branded content and viral distribution strategies. My favorite part, of course, is when he gives props to the DuPont videos starring Amanda Congdon that were launched on FM sites!

“Advertising must be bound to content in this world, Allaire said, and because consumers are more likely to be ’snacking’ — or clicking around and sampling multiple videos to see which they want to sit through — the existing standard 15-second pre-roll with banner is a complete turnoff, as it forces repeated viewing with a resulting negative effect.…”

“Branded marketing content can also be syndicated, Allaire noted. He pointed to DuPont’s program created with Denuo in which a blogger was hired to write science stories. Working with Federated Media, this high-quality content was embedded in IAB standard units and placed within science-related sites.“

More on the DuPont videos.