If you’d asked six months ago about the future of blogs, the answer you got was that they were last year’s news. New blogs were popping up by the second, but already they had been largely dismissed as being too small to be of much value to most mainstream advertisers, the P&Gs and GMs and IBMs.
In just these few months, there’s been a major shift in thinking. Now it’s less about whether blogs are right for P&G. It’s more and more about identifying those advertisers for whom blogs are right. It’s about match-making.
“We are seeing much more micromarketing opportunities. You can get closer to the customers and find a reader that really wants to get closer to the product," says Neil Clemmons, senior vice president of Critical Mass, an interactive services firm that is part of Star Marketing, a division of Omnicom Group.
"It is still early but we are definitely seeing that some of these smaller sites are really intriguing opportunities."
Certainly, it’s the smaller advertiser who has the most to gain through blogs. Big advertisers already have big media, with its huge efficiencies, so niche opportunities such as blogs are just that, perhaps interesting learning experiences but hardly destined to have any effect on sales.
But for the right smaller player, frozen out of traditional media by costs and inefficiencies, blogs represent an explosion in opportunity, the chance through skilled miocromarketing to drive sales exponentially. The classic example is the author of a book on Washington politics advertising his or her title on a blog on Washington politics. What better place to sell a book? The writer reaches the right people, all committed to the topic and the site, and few if any who are not.
The challenge in this new blogscape: Identify all the many other advertisers who most stand to benefit and match them with the blogs from which they have the most to gain.
To be sure, not everyone in media is so optimistic on the future of blogs, as much as they are talked about. Jaap Favier, vice president of Forrester Research, is himself a strong believer, but as he notes, “There is a heated debate right now between the experts.”
“Right now advertisers don’t know what to do with blogs,” observes Patrick Griffith, planning director at Agency Republic, a digital agency in London.
Indeed, a recent Media Life poll found that media planners and buyers were themselves lukewarm on the future of blog advertising. Only a small fraction, 6.4 percent, saw blogs as becoming a key component of online advertising.
The largest share, 44.7 percent, agreed with the following statement: “As long as blogs continue to grow and evolve and demonstrate more professionalism, they will be more accepted as an advertising medium.”
But just under half all but dismissed blogs. Some 40.4 percent agreed with the statement: “I see blogs stagnating and becoming passé. They will never be a great place to advertise, they’re too unpredictable.” The remainder, 8.5 percent, thought blogs were “ridiculous” as advertising vehicles.
The big downsides of blogs are well-known by now. For all but a few, the audiences are tiny, which means buying across a range of them. That’s certainly possible through the networks that have arisen. But then buying a cluster of blogs kind of defeats the whole purpose; the advertiser is now reaching a diverse audience, which means losing the special connectedness that distinguishes blogs. There’s also the risk of putting one’s message where it will have a negative effect, say a car ad on a blog dedicated to creating more commuter bike paths.
“Even with the advent of Blogads (a blog ad network), blog advertising is more like niche marketing,” says Scott Schamberg, vice president of e-marketing at Critical Mass.
Yet blogs in many ways represent the future of the internet—and in some ways of marketing, if somewhere out in the future.
We may think of blogs as kitchen-table media, churned out by passionate amateurs, but they’re really part of a far larger trend toward a more participatory internet, led by social networking, this year’s big thing. On a site like News Corp.’s social networking site MySpace, for instance, users’ home pages function like blogs. Forrester’s Favier points to the recent $900 million search and advertising deal between Google and MySpace as evidence of the true future of blog advertising.
And Favier points to a whole other potential area for blogs: connecting with readers of blogs through their profiles. “Millions of people are expressing themselves every day in digital form,” he says. “This is a very strong database that you could do trend analysis on.”
Those consumers can be reached. If someone puts on their MySpace homepage or their blog that they are trying to decide which of two new cars to buy, they could easily get an ads sent to them from car manufacturers.
Further, marketers could look also at who that person is discussing the car purchase with online. They too could be sent ad messages.
Taking it a step future, email and even Voice over Internet Protocol could be minded for conversations about products. And when TV over the internet takes off, the providers will know which shows each user likes. All this information could ultimately be used to target advertising very precisely.
“Advertising on a blog is a tiny part of the total picture, but it will continue,” says Favier The real value will come from putting market intelligence to work, he says. “I think this is the end of mass marketing.”
Meanwhile, in online ratings for the week ended Sept. 17, the top five parent companies were Microsoft, Yahoo, Time Warner, Google and News Corp. The top five brands were Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live, Google, Microsoft and AOL.
Gus Plc topped the advertisers list again with 9.02 million impressions, a significant lead over second-place NexTag’s 4.99 million impressions. The remainder of the top five companies had much closer numbers, with HSBC Holdings at 1.56 million, Reunion.com at 1.23 million and Netflix Inc. garnering 1.08 million impressions.
Sessions per person dipped from rose from 15 to 16, a 6.67 percent change. Domains visited per person were also up from 36 to 38, a 5.56 increase. Average PC time per person is now at 16 hours, 29 minutes.
