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Volvo Blows Its Ad Money

By Jeralyn, Section Blog Related
Posted on Wed Apr 13, 2005 at 10:05:32 AM EST
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Henry Copeland of Blogads tells Volvo what a raw deal it got buying ad space from Microsoft's "Spaces" blogging environment instead of from brand-name bloggers:

As Steve Hall of Adrants notes that most of Spaces blogs are "empty, useless, pointless weblogs." "A quick review of weblogs listed as recently updated on MSN Spaces revealed few, if any, containing more than a post or two. Many simply state, 'There are no entries in this blog.'"

....To expand on Steve's point, Volvo is, at best, paying to appear above MSNSpaces bloggers who are writing about random stuff, blogospheric noise. Spaces bloggers are newbies on the fringes of the blogosphere. MSN may well have promised Volvo 100 million page impressions a month, but these are impression seen by nobody -- or more exactly "nobodies" -- people who are viewed as influentials only by their moms and ex-girlfriends.

If you are a brand manager craving safety and premium audiences, wouldn't you rather sponsor name-brand bloggers like Markos Moulitsas, Glenn Reynolds, Dave Winer, Jeralyn Merritt, Josh Marshall, Andrew Sullivan, Michelle Malkin, John Hinderocker, Wil Wheaton, Jessa Crispin, Duncan Black, David Gutowski, Hugh Hewitt, John Sickles, Daniel Drezner, Howard Bashman... and hundreds more revered bloggers devoting themselves to themes like law or politics or music or religion or baseball? You can get 'em all here.

Why advertise on the blogs of the anonymous once-a-month-bloggers when you can associate your brand (probably at much lower cost!) with intellectual stars, folks who have national reputations in their respective fields and who are hubs for rabidly loyal communities? And why enrich Bill Gates' another 0.0000000027% when you can put money directly into a smart blogger's pocket?

Henry makes a lot of sense. Particularly when he says,

Rushing to be trendy, Volvo has bought the wrong end of blogging and ignored the only name brands that mean anything: the bloggers'.

Thanks, Henry. Let's hope this goes from your keyboard to an advertiser's mouse.

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    Volvo Blows Its Ad Money | 8 comments (8 topical)
    Re: Volvo Blows Its Ad Money (none / 0) (#1)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Wed Apr 13, 2005 at 10:41:06 AM EST
    Absolutely. I mean I have no doubt that eventually MSN Spaces will carry some heavyweights, just like TypePad and Blogger, but not right away. What you're seeing now is the blogs that get automatically created whenever someone signs up for a junk e-mail account. On the other hand, MSN Spaces is more like LiveJournal in its simplicity, so it may not attract higher-end bloggers. Not that it matters much, because the few superstars they might get are still going to be drowned out by all the other noise if the ads aren't targeted. I wonder if it was the Swedes, or their Ford counterparts that signed up for the advertising.

    Re: Volvo Blows Its Ad Money (none / 0) (#2)
    by cp on Wed Apr 13, 2005 at 06:35:14 PM EST
    interesting. who, exactly, appointed this guy the arbiter of who is, and who isn't, a "famous" blogger. frankly, i find it more than a little arrogant and offensive. most of the names mentioned are legends in their own minds. were you to tap the street, few people would recognize the names of either the authors, or the blog names. JM is a classic case in point. nothing personal, but i'm willing to bet you have far less name recognition among the general public than you might care to admit. i'll use myself as a case in point: college educated professional, read several newspapers a day, watch it on tv, surf the net, do legal research for my job. never heard of you until i hit this site. my guess is volvo hasn't either. without becoming hoist on my own arrogance, i suspect i'm more aware than the average bear. given the huge number of blogs out there, some not mentioned may well be considered shining stars by more than just their mom and girlfriend/boyfriend (i doubt ex's think too highly of them, else they wouldn't be ex's). how on earth would you know? do you read and analyze them all? i doubt your friend does either. btw, i think this is a great site, and i tell others about it all the time.

    Re: Volvo Blows Its Ad Money (none / 0) (#3)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Apr 14, 2005 at 02:01:15 AM EST
    It's all in the traffic stats, cp. He's right in pointing out that most of MSN Spaces are totally empty, because the people who have them don't even know it. Most of those hits are from search engine crawlers and spambots and a private contractor for federal government that archives and parses blogs looking for terrorists. If a tree falls in a forest, with no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

    Re: Volvo Blows Its Ad Money (none / 0) (#4)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Apr 14, 2005 at 12:09:15 PM EST
    I agree with cp. As for Ditto: you made me click! Now, how do I identify the named spider?

    Re: Volvo Blows Its Ad Money (none / 0) (#5)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Apr 14, 2005 at 05:33:53 PM EST
    interesting. who, exactly, appointed this guy the arbiter of who is, and who isn't, a "famous" blogger. frankly, i find it more than a little arrogant and offensive. I think it's fair to say that if your website gets more traffic than the FOX News website, like Steve Gilliard's, then you qualify as a famous blogger. I think that if you're on the list of people MSNBC calls back from time to time for talking head shows, like Jeralyn, and you also get a lot of traffic then you qualify as a famous blogger. If you have a lot of traffic and your name comes up regularly in media (print & television) discussions of blogging, like Instapundit or Markos, then you qualify. The article isn't talking about famous people generically, because if that were the case then there wouldn't be any bloggers listed at all, including Andrew Sullivan who gets mentioned quite a bit and has high traffic to go with it. The vast majority of people, and I'm sure Jeralyn is well aware of this, haven't heard of blogs, let alone any bloggers. If it was talking about famous people generally, Chris Matthews of MSNBC whose show only reaches about a million people, wouldn't even qualify. The point was just this: If you're a company planning to move advertising dollars into a new medium, it's a better idea to pay for ads with names which are established and well known within that medium. What Volvo is doing is the equivalent of saying that you want to advertise in magazines, and then purchasing an ad package that runs lots of spots in struggling, small circulation periodicals chosen without regard to the topic or audience. It would be a waste of money. Just like it's a waste of money for Volvo to advertise on blogs read by, maybe, the same 5 recurring visitors. It's an economic argument based on quantifiable criteria, nothing more.

    Re: Volvo Blows Its Ad Money (none / 0) (#6)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Apr 14, 2005 at 05:39:50 PM EST
    Also, cp, the 'friend' is the guy who runs Blogads. He makes his livelihood by selling advertising on blogs that get a lot of hits, and on having advertisers who are happy with their results, so he has a pretty good idea of which blogs those are. He may not know of all of them, but again, I think he's in a more reasonable position than most to comment on this subject.

    Re: Volvo Blows Its Ad Money (none / 0) (#7)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Apr 14, 2005 at 09:26:49 PM EST
    Thanks, Natasha, for taking the time to explain that. For others that want to see the traffic numbers that blog advertisers go by, you can do that at Blogads here. Henry Copeland indeed is the go-to person in the industry for blogads.

    Re: Volvo Blows Its Ad Money (none / 0) (#8)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Fri Apr 15, 2005 at 10:00:24 AM EST
    Lonewacko: I can't find an e-mail link for you. E-mail me and I'll give you the range of 10 or so IP addresses I've blackholed on that. It's pretty easy to spot in your apache logs, because their spider will hit your entire site several times per day.

    Volvo Blows Its Ad Money | 8 comments (8 topical)