Publicis, the French advertising juggernaut, launched last summer a collaborative platform (Blogbang, still in public beta version for now), aiming to get into the online advertising market. The pitch: companies leave their ad specifications on the website, and members have to follow them to create an ad. Downstream, bloggers or website owners can choose to display Blogbang ads and earn money depending on their traffic.
Although it generated conscequent buzz in the French blogosphere, it did not yet convince many bloggers. Most criticism pointed at the mysterious payment mechanism: revenue is said to be much more fluctuant and lower than Ad-Words one’s. As far as I’m concerned I couldn’t try it because WordPress doesn’t allow scripts on blogs, but I must admit that the idea of “crowdvertising” seduced me. Blogbang allows you to be an advertising agency, dealing with clients’ expectations, and earning money for your work. On top of that, the most creative ads I saw in the last few months were unofficial (see my previous post about the IPhone). Most creative people are not in advertising agencies, they are part of the huge community which made what we call Web 2.0, posting comments on blogs, videos on YouTube, songs on Jamendo or pictures on MySpace.
But the fact is advertising agencies are still here. Despite all the buzz on the web, Apple ordered an official campain for the IPhone release. A brand is too much a big deal for today companies to lose control over it. Marketing specifications are to complex (and confidential) to be delt with by amateur advertisers. For this reason, ads on Blogbang are moderated upstream by customer companies. That may be the reason why so few ads are online 3 months after the site opened (320 only, including many “official” ads made by agencies).
Companies advertising on Blogbang either don’t have enough money to hire an agency, or their marketers don’t have clear strategic vision to chose a specific segment and a tone to adress it. In any case, I would advice them to think again before releasing their brand open-source.
5 Comments
October 13, 2007 at 12:09 pm
I actually think it’s an excellent idea. Adverts are generally perceived as intrusive because they don’t integrate well with a theme in a site. Or any other medium for that matter. Giving content-owners the freedom to completely integrate advertising with their own product should pay off for both parties.
Because of the extra work this represents for blogs, I do think that they should receive more compensation, but I think that the rates they post are more than fair (from 50% of 1000).
Very nice find!
October 13, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Hi Vincent!
Thanks for your early comment. You’re tackling the issue from the bloggers’ point of view. As I wrote, WordPress didn’t allow me to put ads on my blog. For this reason, I couldn’t try it and did not assess this aspect of Blogbang. But I agree with you it’s a good thing for bloggers to chose the ads they want to broadcast.
Blogbang provides two services usually separated: ad production and ad space selling. Blogbang’s innovation is significant in the blogosphere landscape regarding ad space selling, offering an alternative to the mainstream business model (Google adwords).
I was actually pointing at the other part of Blogbang activity in my article: ad production deals too much with strategic data to be crowdsourced.
October 14, 2007 at 9:31 am
Not just from the blogger’s perspective, but any kind of medium. Imagine movie-makers being able to design their own cars for Ford, or retail-outlets creating ads that show product-consumption within the context of their own products or venues.
About strategic data, I’m not 100% sure what you mean, because my French level is not good enough to understand the whole blogbang-service. I think a marketing-strategy can be controlled, by creating strict specifications for how adverts are created, and within the context of collaboration between both parties. If adverts are created to benefit both parties however, I think the effectiveness is much higher then a generic box could ever be.
October 14, 2007 at 11:55 am
As I understood the service offered by Blogbang, ad producers are not necessarily the ones who will broadcast them on their websites. Blogbang’s core idea is not to allow people to create ads that will fit perfectly their website. On the one hand, it lets people produce adverts for selected companies which give them a basic pitch (and not marketing specifications since Blogbang members are not marketers and don’t speak the same language as professionals). On the other hand, bloggers or webmasters can pick up ads in the pool, and broadcast them on their website.
So far, most successful ads are directly posted by the company on Blogbang (marked as “advertiser’s commercial”).
I think Blogbang tries to reconcile two irreconciliable activities (crowdsourced ad production and ad space selling). As witnesses the increasing part of “advertiser’s commercials”, ad space selling will remain Blogbang’s core activity. Its business model is innovative and different from Google one (adwords): pulled by website owners (chosing ads) rather than pushed by companies (buying words and context). I totally agree with you that better ads integration to websites strengthens their efficiency. For this reason, I strongly believe such a model will stand as a good alternative to traditionnal advertising on the web.
October 15, 2007 at 7:50 am
Thanks for the elaboration. I checked out the website so more and it seems much like a youtube for amateur-marketeers, than people making themes for their own site. Flash is not exactly my cup of tea, though the range of companies involved in it is interesting.
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