This was the title of one of the presentations from the Future of Online Advertising conference, however I’m going to summarise a number of presentations that dealt with the same subject but with different angles.

Beyond Google’s AdSense product, which appears on numerous blogs, it isn’t that easy to buy advertising on blogs. Here are three companies that have answers to that.

Federated Media Publishing

www.federatedmedia.net

What’s their pitch?

FM represents outstanding authors whose sites cater to cultural influencers, technology decision makers, early adopters and business leaders. Our first “federation,” focused on digital business and culture, reaches millions and millions of unique readers every month. New federations in the small business, media/entertainment and parenting categories, representing millions of entrepreneurs, upscale consumers and families, are in the process of launching as well.

They also say that just looking at visitor numbers isn’t necessarily the most effective metric to use when choosing a site to advertise on.

Dooce.com has 20,000 inbound links versus 12,000 for iVillage and 4,000 for Babycenter. These other two sites have greater visitor numbers and are much more established, but they have less authority than Dooce.com. Maybe we need to get away from just eyeballs as a measure of which site to advertise on.
Who do they represent?

Numerous blogs across multiple industry sectors. These include some major “names” in the technology/Web 2.0 are including:

BoingBoing
Digg
GigaOM
MobileCrunch
Ask a Ninja

Plus many, many more.

Basically, if you want to get exposure amongst the major technology bloggeratti and the early adopters/influencers, these are your guys.

What have they done?

A campaign for Microsoft where they ran ads with author-assisted copy versus standard ad copy. Author-assisted ads were far more effective.

Absolut Vodka did co-branded ads with boingboing and psfk where the blog owners had input into the copy and creative. These ads performed four times better than other ads in the campaign.

Symantec advertised an RSS feed. Turned the ad into content and was hugely successful.

Co-branded, author-driven invitations to conversation. They set up a wiki around the Human Network concept for Cisco. Other bloggers started posting about it. Human Network ended up on Wikipedia by the choice of the independent editor. The end result was a number 2 organic result on Google search for the campaign page, and number 9 for Human Network on Cisco.com

Arranged for Intel to partners with Digg to pay for digg arc, creating a rich co-branded experience for Intel and allowing digg to add a great piece of functionality to their site.

In summary:

• Locate your brand communities
• Follow the leaders, partner with them
• Add value to existing conversations

There are both PR plus the usual advertising measurable results.

BlogAds

www.blogads.com

What’s their pitch?

They were first. Sold their first blog ad in Sept 2002.
Keeping it real - 24 people and not venture funded
Hive or a la carte placement

Who do they represent?

Uberblogger Perez Hilton plus 1,100 more.

What have they done?
They have a very strong political focus and represent a number of the major US political blogs, many of which were credited with significantly influencing the outcome of the 2004 presidential election campaign.

Case Study - Audi A3 “Art of the heist” campaign
- Blogs created 29% of the total traffic to the site at 0.4% of the budget.

PayPerPost

www.payperpost.com

What’s their pitch?
Blog advertising started with AdSense. Easy way for bloggers to monetize their sites.

Next evolution is blog ad networks like Federation Media. Ability to get to the star blogs.

The problem with this is how do you get access to the long tail and millions of smaller blogs.

Blog outreach - Microsoft gave away laptops to bloggers with Vista installed.

PayPerPost is the next evolution.

Marketplace that connects advertisers (currently 6,500) with bloggers (currently 27,000).

Advertisers compensate bloggers to create sponsored content.

Example:

Cellphone company wants to launch new product.

Cellphone company creates an opportunity in the marketplace.

Bloggers browse opportunities and choose the ones they want to blog about.

PayPerPost reviews and checks content.

PayPerPost are intermediary for the payment from advertiser to the blogger.

Ability for advertisers to target bloggers.

Who Do They Represent?

Everyone, and anyone. If you have a log, you can potentially get paid to blog.

What have they done?

Case Study - Bug movie: Provided bloggers with content assets (images, video, etc). Trailer was the number 1 video on Technorati within a day

Have just launched PayPerPost Direct: Allows bloggers to advertise on their site to say they will do a sponsored post for a specific fee.

WARNING: There is massive backlash amongst certain parts of the blogging community about PayPerPost. Many consider it a major issue that the blogosphere may be overwhelmed with blog posts that are basically advertorials.

Personally, I’m not sure yet. I think in certain cases, it is perfectly acceptable. Lots of people are going to blog about the next Motorola phone anyway, why shouldn’t they get paid to do it. It is very difficult area, but it is a brave new world, so let’s give it a chance and see what happens.