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May 24, 2009 - May 30, 2009

May 28, 2009

Could U.S. Military Get a Google Grant?

I just got off the phone with someone representing the newly-launched Real Warriors effort, an initiative intended "to promote the processes of building resilience, facilitating recovery and supporting reintegration of returning service members, veterans and their families." It's a creation of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury (DCoE), apparently a division of the U.S. Defense Department. Essentially, the campaign is a Web site providing information for active duty, families, and vets. There's info on signs of stress, things to do before deployment, and treatment of psychological problems associated with military duty.

The contact there told me essentially there's no ad budget for the campaign. The site is pretty much it. But the fact is it could help a lot more people if there was a search ad campaign promoting it, or if display ads were running on health/medical sites catering to people in the military.

The U.S. government invariably runs the most online display ads in the government vertical, according to several reports I've seen from Nielsen Online over the years. But I've always understood those to be PSAs. Couldn't this campaign qualify for free ad space? What about a Google Grant?

Just thought I'd ask aloud since it seems like a good non-partisan cause.

Posted by Kate Kaye at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

PR Case Study: Gawker Plays the Ad Press Like a Fiddle

There's paid media, there's earned media, and there's burned media. A controversial HBO campaign now running on Gawker Media sites somehow wrangled all three.

Here's what happened in case you missed it: Gawker executed a custom sponsorship for the HBO series True Blood that involved a phony vampire blog that was passed off as a newly acquired site in the Gawker portfolio. That sleight of hand pulled the wool over the not-very-discerning eyes of New York tech blog Business Insider. ClickZ avoided initial coverage in part because it's unseemly to dwell on the embarrassing mistakes of another publisher -- hey, everyone's entitled to a mistake -- and in part because it's a somewhat ham-fisted execution on Gawker's part.

But the ensuing coverage -- by Mediapost, Adweek, AgencySpy and others -- have transformed it into a case study on the PR potential of micro-scandals. And Gawker has shown repeatedly that it can milk such scandals for all they're worth. (Update: per Brian's comment below, I should say Adweek ran a straight story relative to the many others who led with the scandal.)

To fill in the details, in recent weeks HBO and Gawker laid the groundwork for a supposedly vampire-written blog called BloodCopy. The site was unveiled over the weekend and presented jokingly as a recently acquired member of the Gawker family. Gawker provided the architecture and wrote the blog, which has been syndicated to other Gawker sites in the form of sponsored posts. At first, these were not always clearly labeled as ads. Campfire was the creative agency behind the campaign.

Two days after BI ran its straight-faced story on the vampire site, Gawker editor Gabriel Snyder objected, writing, "Gawker Media has been taken to the media criticism woodshed over this one. What's advertising should be called advertising and what's edit should be called edit. It hurts both to blur the distinction." Gladly he noted an earlier post trumpeting the "acquisition" of BloodCopy had been deleted.

However Snyder's victory rang hollow when BloodCopy's supposedly objectionable post was later reinstated -- proving who really wears the pants in the Gawker family (VP Sales Chris Batty). As the week wore on a number of trade rags weighed in, generating valuable publicity for Gawker -- never mind HBO.

Reactions from Gawker's management were mixed. Nick Denton issued an ambiguous mea culpa, retweeting media writer Rachel Sklar's comment, "The news is that Gawker Ad leveraged (+ undermined the credibility of) Gawker Editorial to promote an ad campaign."

Meanwhile Chris Batty defended the strategy, telling the Nieman Journalism Lab, "If we're around in three or four years, the majority of our advertising revenue will be in sponsored posts like this."

Hyperbole or not, Batty's message to advertisers -- undeniably favorable to Gawker's sales efforts -- is this: We'll go the extra mile for you, editorial priggishness be damned. And if we cross a line with our readers, we'll back off.

And what's wrong with that, really? It's certainly worked for Gawker in the past. Recall that in 2007 Gawker sold a site takeover to Evian, which plastered the whole site in pink. Editor Choire Sicha complained then too, and Denton apologized.

Does Gawker engineer these little outrages? I don't think so. Does it cultivate them? You decide.

Posted by Zachary Rodgers at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

May 26, 2009

IAB to Hold Presser in Face of Impending Gov't Intervention

There's no question the online ad industry is getting more serious about government intervention. With Congress pretty much saying they'll draft a bill this year, and the Federal Trade Commission giving countless "this is your last chance" warnings (the last one took place during a panel I moderated in D.C. a couple weeks ago), organizations like the Network Advertising Initiative and the Interactive Advertising Bureau are on the defensive.

The IAB just sent out an invite to media outlets that indicates its serious attention to the matter. On June 10 in Washington, D.C., the organization "will announce the results of the first-ever comprehensive analysis of the economic and social impact of the ad-supported Internet," according to the invite. "Produced by Harvard Business School Professors John Deighton and John Quelch, the IAB-commissioned study is an impartial and comprehensive examination of the overall impact of the Internet on the U.S. economy as well as its underlying components.

Well, we know the Internet has had a huge, mostly positive effect on the U.S. economy, and arguably society. And, at this point, the bulk of the revenue for Internet content comes from online retail and - yes - advertising. That qualifier, "the ad-supported Internet," is important here. If we can assume the "ad-supported" Internet has been great for the economy and society, then the IAB will surely conclude that the industry that enables that ad support must not be squelched by strict regulations or legislation. Or else, they'll argue, the positive impact of the Internet could in turn be damaged.

The event will be held at 12:30 on June 10 at the National Press Club.

Posted by Kate Kaye at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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