Web Site Lets Bloggers Make Their Own Ads for Big Company Products

"Nescafé Brews Buzz Via Blogs," WSJ, P. B3 11/23/07

[a French website]

"BlogBang [BlogBang.com, a website with 2,000 bloggers as participants] also has tried to draw bloggers into the creative process. Companies looking for new ways to pitch their products can post requests for bloggers to develop their own campaigns. BlogBang's members can then put their homemade ads on the site. The one that gets the most clicks is spread around the bloggers' Web sites, and the author of the winning ad earns a fee. Garnier, a division of cosmetics group L'Oréal, advertised its Fructis hair gel this way. Garnier couldn't be reached for comment."



http://insights20.com/2007/07/09/blogbang-a-network-for-consumer-generated-advertising/


"Blogbang: a network for consumer-generated advertising
Published July 9th, 2007 in blogging.

"My friend Julien Braun just launched in France a new ad network called BlogBang . BlogBang is a marketplace for advertisers, “creatives” and publishers (bloggers).

"An advertiser submits a creative brief, “creatives” (consumers, agencies, etc) generate their own commercial (mostly video), which show on the publisher’s blog. Example here or here. Publishers/bloggers can pick ads that might work well based on their editorial content. An optimization system (I am not sure how it works, but I think something like advertising.com) determines over time which ads work better for each blog.

"The interesting part is that creatives and publishers split the revenues (with the ad agency of course). And anyone can be a creative and try to compete with the professional agencies to create the most efficient ads. As opposed to traditional creative contests, which are judged on their creative qualities, the best ads here are those that perform better. So, consumers who understand how to create ads that would perform well with a particular audience, on a particular blog, etc, can get a share of the action and help publishers make more money with ads that perform better.

"Julien’s philosophy is that each media has its own advertising format (30 seconds for TV etc) but that social media has not found yet a format that works well. By letting users create their own ads, advertising becomes social and, while serving the advertiser’s brief, has a human voice."

Making TV Advertising Like the Internet

The Internet is rapidly gaining popularity as an advertising medium because ads are individually targeted to users. So Google, for example, can take into account a person's searching history when they present an ad for him or her to look at (at least, this is how I interpret the situation.)

TV on the other hand is "mass media" which is to say everyone watching a TV program sees the same ad. This could change, but it would require some modification of the technical system through which TV is currently delivered. I believe however, that these technical problems have already been solved in the pursuit of other product ideas that ended up not working (the various schemes that provided for viewer input. Do they have this on American Idol?)

For example, the cable company could build a profile of a viewer based on his or her viewing habits and then provide different ads to different people on that basis. Alternately, the cable company could link to "cookie" data accumulated by the person's Internet surfing. Presumably, this would have to be voluntarily done by people on an individual basis. It seems that some might do it nonetheless, however, in order to be able to see ads related to things they actually wanted, which would be more enjoyable (presuming they will have to see some kind of ads).

This idea is presented separately from the whole TiVo problem, which is reducing peoples viewing of ads. The fact is, ads are still sold so the idea could still be workable. Presumably, an early stage filter built into the system would be required to remove any porn-related Web surfing cookies for this to work. Some people would still feel uncomfortable about making public certain aspects of their Web surfing. For example, this could apply to politics. People who felt uncomfortable about those things would presumably not opt for the option to link to the cookie data. But the porn thing would need to be dealt with automatically, since this is supposedly the single biggest use of the Web.