ChasNote

At a conference earlier this week, Intel’s David Veneski presented stats on Intel’s sponsorship of PopURLS Blue Edition for Enterprise IT. In May, visitors to the site, on average, were more than 100% likely to interact with content assets, clicking on headlines in order to read full stories. If the goal is to build something your customers want, the rate of active engagement is a great proxy for performance. In this case, Intel aced it.

I spoke at the Ascentium PDX onference, too. Here are some photos posted to Flickr.

Intel’s sponsorship of PopURLs Blue Edition for Enterprise IT is winning fans. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb says:

“Now [PopURLs founder] Marban has partnered with Intel to create one of the most interesting ad campaigns I’ve seen in awhile, Blue.PopURLs.com. The site is a single page aggregator about hot enterprise IT news. Calm down, I know enterprise IT is boring — but the site is cool…..”

“The Intel partnership in particular is remarkable as a simple way for advertisers to deliver value to audiences in exchange for a little bit of mindshare. Next to the top enterprise software stories from around the web, you’ll find links to Intel white papers and blogs.”

I also love the disclosure attached to the post. FM manages advertising for ReadWriteWeb and Intel’s ads have been running on the site, but Marshall says he notices the campaign only after seeing Intel’s ads on another FM site, Boing Boing.

“Disclosure: The Blue ad campaign is being run through FM publishing, who also sells ads here on RWW. I just found the site through an FM ad on BoingBoing and thought it was worth writing up.”

Advertising works in mysterious ways.

Credits: The people behind this project include Thomas Marban at PopURLs; David Veneski at Intel; Josh Mattison and Jason Ratner at FM.

Intel has underwritten the launch of a version of PopURLs dedicated to enterprise IT content, PopURLs Blue. Another great example of Intel’s strategy to sponsor product enhancements at existing third-party brands that already reach their customers, like the launch of Digg Images, Digg’s Arc visualization widget, and a better music experience for My Space members.