Negotiating 101

Dan Putman is the newest addition to our team at Underscore. Dan is fresh out of college, smart and eager.

Today, we gave Dan an assignment designed to hone his negotiating skills - an assignment I was fond of giving young media buyers at K2 back in the day.

We told Dan to leave his wallet, money and credit cards on his desk. We then gave him precisely $2 and told him to go to the Dunkin' Donuts on 7th Avenue and acquire as many Munchkins as possible. Current market price for Munchkins is $0.20 apiece. We told Dan we expect him to come back to the office with more than 10 Munchkins.

While this must seem like a take on fraternity hazing, the folks I gave this assignment to at K2 got very good at negotiating with the Dunkin' Donuts counter clerk. They became masterful at negotiating bonus Munchkins and discounts from "rate card."

What will Dan be able to negotiate on his first Dunkin' Donuts assignment? Tune in to Hespos.com shortly to find out...

Blogs and the Flow Experience

Bill from Pheedo liked my post on blog advertising, but doesn't dig the notion of using disruptive advertising on blogs.

Bill's post makes a great point, and I want to clarify my earlier comments to address what he's saying here...

Right now, blog advertising needs to be a part of the blog reader's flow experience. Allow me to explain what I mean by that, because it's incredibly important. Blog readers are typically in "mission critical" mode when they visit their favorite blogs. Let's say I'm visiting Atrios on my lunch hour at work. All I want to do is get into Eschaton, read up on the topics that interest me, maybe post a couple comments, and move on. Any advertising that disrupts this flow experience is likely to be seen as annoying. IMHO, disruptive advertising like floating ads and pop-ups disrupt this flow experience with the goal of capturing attention. These types of ads tend to work best when the advertiser is competing with many other ads on the page or when they otherwise need to be disruptive.

The good news is that blogs aren't terribly cluttered (yet). There's no need to be disruptive, and I think that advertisers are better served by using ad units that "go with the flow" and don't create hiccups for the blog reader in the flow experience. I wouldn't recommend using pop-ups, floating ads or anything that's going to cause the reader to be forced to devote exclusive attention to the ad when they'd rather be focusing that attention on content.

At the same time, I don't think that advertisers can always get their message across using text ads or other ads that tend to show up in the same off-to-the-side placement every time. Often, advertisers want to present a more detailed message. And they don't want to appear in areas where readers see ads all the time and tend to tune them out.

The solution is meeting somewhere in the middle. Again, I have to be vague about what we placed on behalf of our client, but suffice it to say:

• We used animated GIFs, not rich media
• The placement was very respectful of the flow experience
• It was a persistent placement in the sense that it appeared on every page, but the placement varied slightly every time the blog was updated.
• Response rates increased over the course of the campaign

I wish I could point you to an example, but I think that might tweak the client a bit.

I also want to go on the record as saying that I dig BlogAds. I also like the idea of reaching blog readers through Google AdSense. However, I'm also of the opinion that bloggers tend to place these ad programs in the same place on their blogs and that readers will likely tend to tune those ad placements out once they become accustomed to seeing them in the same spot on every visit. I didn't think BlogAds or AdSense were appropriate for this particular placement because we didn't want the ads to be tuned out. (Besides, the blog we advertised on didn't make use of BlogAds or Adsense.) Additionally, we wanted to get a more complex message across than could be conveyed by a 150x200 graphic placement and 300 characters of text. That's about all I can say about this.

That's not to say that I think ad agencies should start peppering blogs with page takeovers, pop-ups, dancing baloney, annoying ads that blink or make noise, and other disruptive executions. Being disruptive in these environments doesn't serve the advertiser well, nor does it appeal to the reader. On top of that, blogs tend to be uncluttered environments (as they exist today), and there's no need to haul out the disruptive ad formats. A simple GIF will work just fine, as will Flash ads that don't creep outside their allotted pixel real estate without user interaction. I use the term "rich media" to refer to any ad that uses technology beyond that of animated GIFs, static JPEGs or text links. Not all rich media ads are disruptive. Since I didn't want to suggest that disruptive ads are the way to go here, I thought this clarification post was in order.

YMMV. There's no such thing as a completely unintrusive advertisement. But there are varying degrees of intrusiveness and media buyers should be respectful of this.

Yes, Blogs Are A Great Advertising Environment

I've been reading posts about how blogs are great for advertisers and how blogs reach desirable audiences.

If you're here, you likely know that I'm a founding partner of a media agency called Underscore Marketing. It's my job to know how blogs can tap into desirable audiences from an advertising perspective. I can give you some anecdotal evidence that blogs get the job done, but please know that clients are usually very skittish about talking about their online advertising publicly. (So what I'm about to say here needs to be somewhat vague.) Suffice it to say:

• I have a client that was willing to test a blog this quarter.
• We did.
• Said blog kicked ass and was one of the best performers on the campaign.
• It performed very well despite the fact that mainstream sites cover the same category, have larger audiences and have offline components (like print magazines).
• If I had to attribute its success to something, it would likely be the dedication of the audience to said blog and the audience's trust in the blog's coverage.
• Our next media plan for this client will include more blogs. This is driven by the success of the blog we tested, plus the desire to tap into audiences that haven't seen the client's message before.
• We will likely renew our deal with the first blog, and possibly increase our commitment to them from a monetary perspective.

A few other things I want to mention...

There are quite a few media buyers who end up here for one reason or another. I have this message for them: If you're not considering advertising on blogs that deal with topics of interest to your clients and their target audiences, you're doing your client a disservice. Put down the @Plan runs and the MRI crosstabs for a sec and take a calculated chance for your clients. It will pay off. Relevance is one of the prime drivers of success in online advertising. Blogs have dedicated audiences that come back again and again to consume quality topical content. Your client wants to be associated with such editorial environments (or at least they should). Propose a small test with a blog, gauge its success, and you'll likely find it to perform particularly well.

Here's another thing...I like the concept behind BlogAds, but major advertisers are going to want to run larger size GIFs, Flash and rich media. My preference is to cut the deal directly with the person running the blog for an ad package that's more robust than what you can get through BlogAds. And I'm looking for something that's persistent, so that every person who visits the blog is exposed to the ad. That means sponsorships, locked-in positions on the home page, and possibly ads on every archive and story page.

Some words of advice to bloggers hoping to attract advertisers:

• Place an "advertise" link somewhere on your homepage. Link this to a page that lists contact information for someone who can sell advertising on your blog. Make sure this isn't a submission form that sends an e-mail out to whoever is handling ad sales. Reason: When online media buyers are putting plans together, they're typically dealing with tight turnaround times (usually just a few days). When they find a site they want to advertise on, they want to get someone on the phone to discuss that possibility, asap.
• Know everything you possibly can about your audience. I just got an ad proposal from a blog that was absolutely terrific - It contained a snapshot of traffic growth over several months, names of companies whose executives visited the site regularly, and plenty of other statistics that painted a picture of the audience for me.
• Know how your blog's competitors set pricing. If your blog competes in a category with non-blogs, know what their prices are (usually available on a "rate card" linked on the site itself). Advertisers tend to have a range of CPMs (Cost Per Thousand ad impressions) that they pay to reach audiences in their particular sector. If your blog is priced too high, the advertising opportunity looks less attractive to the advertiser.
• Offer test rates. Most advertisers haven't advertised on blogs before, and they consider blogs an unproven vehicle. If you can put together small test packages, consisting of ad runs that span 2-4 weeks and cost between $2,000 and $5,000, you'll have more success attracting advertisers. And those advertisers will likely renew once they've pulled off a successful test.
• Don't get discouraged if media buyers say no. Most media buyers are lazy. They don't want to be bothered with smaller sites that are unproven. They're so used to buying ads on the Yahoos, MSNs and AOLs of the world that they tend to ignore niche opportunities. You'll know within a couple minutes of talking on the phone whether or not you're talking to a media buyer who is interested in blog advertising. The uninterested ones will harp on "potential reach of the site" and say "your site is too small." The interested ones will ask you questions about who your site reaches, what kind of repeat traffic you get and what ad opportunities are available to reach your audience.

I think blog advertising will be a force to be reckoned with eventually, but it's going to take some time. First, blogs need to get on the radar screens of major marketers with money to spend. Then it's going to take some time for them to engage in small-scale testing before they make serious commitments. My advice to the blog community is to be patient and to keep doing what you're doing. Content truly is king, and as blogs draw more eyeballs away from mainstream news and topical sites, the dollars will follow the eyeballs.

'Caching in Cheesequake

Leslie and I took Sunday off to go geocaching in New Jersey. I fueled up the vette and met her at her place in Hoboken early on Sunday morning. After a brief stop at a Denny's in NJ ("Moons over My Hammy, please...") we went to Cheesequake State Park, where we found three caches and hiked for what seemed like forever. Along the way, we spotted some whitetail deer, swatted away many creepy crawlies and got plenty of exercise.

Our handheld GPS devices seemed to have quite a bit of trouble (more than usual) with getting a signal through the tree canopy. I don't remember this ever being much of a problem on prior trips, but it was definitely a problem in Cheesequake.

Anyway, we had a great time, and I need to do more 'caching so I can get my exercise and my nature kick taken care of in one fell swoop.