Media Bones: Here Boy
The New York Times has an article about two interactive campaigns that, gasp, placed media on blogs.
Great. The more time online advertising gets to shine, the better. But this is pathetic:
“What is most valuable about nontraditional media like blogs, Mr. Deaver said, is their ability to “actively engage the consumer” compared with “passive TV spots” and other traditional choices.”
What they are really saying is that by spending a pittance ($20k) , they can get the New York Times to write about the campaign, which is worth just as much.
The actively engaging part is interactive advertising not blogs. The ad formats on most blogs are not even particularly creative. They are using formats that have been around for 10 years. Marketers are finally learning how to use them.
Here’s another pearler:
“When you do something unusual, unexpected, with something so well known as Monopoly, you can get a lot of talk value,” said Mark Blecher, senior vice president for marketing at the Hasbro Games division of Hasbro in Longmeadow, Mass.
Talk value! Yep, by opening up the petty cash box and extending the online media plan to include a few raw blogs, they can get an article written about them. The cost of the blog media buys is about as much as they pay their PR firm to hassle the same New York Times writer every month.
Good work Hasbro and Budget Rent a car (and their PR firm and ad agency), wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee the New York Times.
[…] That’s why craigslist’s traffic has almost tripled since last year (please ignore the irony of me linking to a New York Times article to back up an argument. Thank you, we now return you to the post). And that’s why eBay is continuing to grow very strongly. […]