Marketing Idea

A prima donna. A firestarter. The moody midfielder. I kick goals, create chances and set the pitch ablaze. A marginal Type A personality.



One stray negative comment soured this whole blogging thing for me. Normally it would have just annoyed me enough to write back. Sometimes, though, it is all just too hard and there are more important things to attend to. Being vindictive just shrinks you to their level.



I hope to write more often. I know I don't have an audience any more, except for spammers. My TTLB rating may as well be atomical.



I will try writing again, because I do enjoy it. However the football season is upon us, I take singing lessons every monday night and I have realised I need to up my literature/females/meditative intake.



This is what made me want to write again. Partly because it was inspirational. Partly because the author excites me... in a non sexual way of course.



Life is too short to let a$$holes get you down, "Roll with the punches, tomorrow is another day".

Fascinating post on New York Times which adds further credence to the slow march of blogs into the periphery of mainstream media.

Here are some of the key points:

I recently wrote on Performancing about giving some consideration to your blog business exit strategy. My post was spawned from an excellent piece of journalism on Business Week titled Googling For Gold which basically looks at the phenomenon of starting niche tech businesses with the intention of selling out to Google 12 months later. It was while reading this post that I spotted a particularly intriguing paragraph:

"Google is creating a whole new ecosystem for entrepreneurs, says Baris Karadogan of U.S. Venture Partners, a high-tech VC firm in Silicon Valley. Karadogan says he's closely watching a group of entrepreneurs who are designing a highly specialized online advertising tool, hoping to sell it to Google for $50 million. "Before," he laments, "you needed a VC. Now you can build a Linux-based data system for $100,000 and survive long enough to sell without ever raising a venture round."

Umm, which company is running a beta version of a "highly specialized online advertising tool" at the moment? Is it just me, or am I seeing a Google future for Chitika!

Looks like Yahoo Publisher is following the lead of Google AdSense by adding a direct deposit feature. More on Jensense.

When Budget the car rental company began their Up Your Budget campaign there must have been a sense of trepidation. But the whole venture which centred around a "Charlie and the Choclate Factory" style treasure hunt has turned out to be an unqualified success. Most of the promotion was done through the BlogAds Network and according to Media Post - Scott Deaver, Budget's chief marketing officer, said "the entire contest and promotion including the $160,000 in prize money cost less than a single 30-second spot on a highly rated TV show."

Here are BlogAds metrics:

In terms of exposure this is a phenomenal return on investment.

Steve Rubel theorises on the rise of blog advertising in his post "As Portal Inventory Dwindles, Will Ads on Blogs Rise" . He makes a good point - with portal inventory booked for months ahead surely it's time for some big bucks ad dollars to find their way into the cream of the blogosphere. Certainly, Steve points to some tantalising evidence on TechWeb that "Advertising executives see blogs, podcasts and web-enabled cellular phones as newcomers in the market that are worth watching, but have yet to prove they're worth as major investments, a survey released Tuesday showed."

My heart tells me that blog advertising maybe approaching an important cross roads, going from an unruly teenager if you like, to a fully paid up adult of media society. But my head tells me that the cross roads is being called too early, as is alluded to in the "worth watching, but yet to prove worth" bit of the above statement. Almost in paralell to some of my statements about where "blogging in general currently sits" in my post The Wider Implications of Business Blog Survey my belief is that blog advertising proper has some growing up to do on a number of fronts.

I'm not being a stick in the mud for saying this - it's what I think is an objective assessment, based on recent experiences in the advertising agency environment. However, what I ultimately believe this boils down to is a question of time and acceptance into the mainstream. How long will that take is an interesting question? I think we have already seen tentative toes dipped into the water and that will probably be the form for another six months to year. In terms of when we might see consistent multi million dollar ad inventory commitments I think we're potentially looking at 18 months - 2 years. But who really knows!

Dear Blogger,



I can track the IP of the people that put abusive comments on my blog, but why can't I remove the comment?



That is all for today.