BuzzMachine

New York Times ad columnist Stuart Elliot gives admiring attention to an ad campaign conducted on blogs: the Budget campaign that came from Henry Copeland at BlogAds, Hugh MacLeod, B.L. Ochman and other smart folks:

Joining the throng are the Budget Rent a Car unit of the Cendant Corporation…. Budget turned to blogs to promote a contest with a scavenger hunt motif, buying advertisements on 177 blogs bearing names like BuzzMachine, Gizmodo, Jossip, Largehearted Boy, Overheard in New York, Stereogum and The Superficial….

“I’ve got to be smart and make my brand feel smart to the consumer,” said Scott Deaver, executive vice president for marketing at the Cendant Car Rental Group in Parsippany, N.J., which oversees Budget and Avis….

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….

The blog campaign for Budget cost about $20,000, Mr. Deaver said. The ads appearing on the 177 blogs asked readers to visit a blog sponsored by Budget (upyourbudget.com) and enter a treasure hunt being held for four weeks in 16 cities with cash prizes of $160,000. The final contest, in San Diego, ended this week. “Blogs seemed an appropriate fit for Budget’s young, tech-savvy audience,” said Jay Arnold, president and chief executive at the Impax Marketing Group in Philadelphia, which created the blog campaign for Budget….

The blogs were selected, Mr. Arnold said, with the help of a consultant, B. L. Ochman, using criteria like how frequently they are updated and how interesting they are to the so-called technorati. In fact, Mr. Arnold said, the tracking service technorati.com was used to help pick the blogs….

Mr. Deaver said he was pleased enough with the results of the campaign to have decided “we’ll certainly be back in this space.” (The Budget blog tells readers the next contest will be “sometime in spring 2006.”)

Even so, “the jury’s still out on the metrics,” Mr. Deaver said. “I’d be lying if I said I know what to measure to determine success.”

By a preliminary count, Mr. Deaver said, the blog pages on which the Budget ads appeared had 19.9 million impressions, which generated about 60,000 click-throughs to the Budget blog. That accounted for about half the total traffic to the Budget blog, he added.

“I’m happy about those numbers,” Mr. Deaver said, “but the real determination is, what do we learn? Are we smarter when we do it next time?”

Give that ad man a lollipop!

: Correct my math — please! — but I think this works out to a $1 CPM and a $.33 CPC.

: Full disclosure: Buzzmachine was, indeed, one of the sites (though I almost messed it up). I think I made $100 for it. I’ve since raised my rates.

I do have sympathy with the Pajamas Media guys for the name headaches. I named Entertainment Weekly — and always hated that name because it was boring and obvious and when you talk as fast as I do it’s hard to say. I’ve been trying to help name another venture and after 20 minutes I get headaches hearing word-association games gone wacky. It’s a lot easier naming kids. Anyway, after the Pajamas whiplash, blamed on a naming company, I saw a link to this post with advice on naming, which in turn pointed to a naming company’s blog. There are whole industries now to optimize search and invent names. Whatever happened to making widgets?

: And to see just how bad the name shortage is, look no farther than Emily Chang’s eHub, an unintentionally hilarious list of names gone over the edge. Names are hard. Very hard.

The Washington Post as a remix page, encouraging developers to make creative use of the paper’s RSS feeds (not unlike some of what the BBC is doing). Perfect attitude. Great first step.

Next, they should put up their interviews and other raw material and let people remix that into better stories. And they should let the people create their own front page.

One step at a time and this is a good step.

Well Pajamas Media, nee OSM, nee Open Source Media, nee Pajamas Media is trying to do some navel-gazing on Thanksgiving and one thing becomes painfully, loudly, self-apparently apparent:

They have no idea what they want to be or why they exist.

Which is what I’ve said from the start.

Really: Just read the closed-loop discussion among only the PM people — no outsiders allowed, no comments allowed (though Roger is thinking about requiring a donation to God-knows-what charity to be allowed the privilege of allowing comments), no different perspectives welcome. And boy, do they need some.

Here’s the challenge, folks: Stand back and see whether you can agree on just one thing. Finish this sentence in no more than 10 words: Pajamas Media is _________________.

Until you can do that, there is no sense in arguing over logos, names, functionality, linking, comments, anything. What are you? Why do you exist? Until you can answer that, you shouldn’t exist. You don’t exist. You are just, everyone there seems to agree, a corporate-looking page that does too little.

But it sure is amusing to watch.

Well, this sucks. Hossein Derakhshan, one of the great pioneers of international blogging and freedom of speech online — a friend of democracy and, one should assume, America — has been barred from re-entering the country for six months. He tells the tale on his blog. The long and short of it is that on a quick trip between the U.S. and Canada, the border officials — being Homeland Security, after all — Googled his name, found his blog, and tried to find incriminating evidence that he was living and working in the U.S. without proper paperwork. A copy of Newsweek with his name and a New York address finally did him in.

How do we help him? Global Voices, which Hossein helped create, is at the Harvard Law School. I hope they know some experts in immigration law.

I will write a testimonial for Hossein telling how he is advancing the causes of freedom and democracy in Iran and elsewhere on earth.

I will write to my senators.

And isn’t it sadly ironic that Iran — whose dictatorial regeime he challenged starting the weblog revolution there — also questioned him and let him in and out. But America will not let him in.

That is our loss. And we need to fix it.

: Also see today’s NY Times story about the bloggers of China exercising their freedom where they can in spite of companies, including American companies, helping to censor them by building their firewalls and handing dissidents over to authorities.

We have to get our authorities to see that these bloggers are the peaceful freeÃ¥dom fighters of our age, using the internet and free speech as the best weapons possible against tyranny. Isn’t that our fight as well? Shouldn’t we be helping them however we can?

: Here’s the Committee to Protect Blogger’s post and here is Journalism.co.uk’s.

Vaughn Ververs writes an odd and emotional and ultimately simplistic analysis of journalistic objectivity and transparency over at CBS’ Public Eye, using me and reaction to Rep. John Murtha’s call to pull out of Iraq as his jumping-off points.

First, Vaughn misses the point on the objectivity debate. It isn’t that with the death of the objectivity ideal — or the admission that it was a false idol — you must now slant every newscast. That’s what he says and that’s what is simplistic, in my view. Instead, I say that the ethic of transparency requires you reveal the biases you do have because your audience deserves to know them, so they can judge your judgments. Having done that, then, of course, you should still try to be accurate, truthful, fair, balanced, and all that. But to refuse to reveal a bias — or rather, call it a perspective — and to, indeed, hide it is a lie of omission. There’s no agenda worse than a hidden agenda.

When Murtha made his call to pull out of Iraq, it was given major coverage — “All three nightly newscasts led with them, as did the New York Times, Washington Post, and other newspapers,” Public Eye reported at the time. But conservatives said this shouldn’t have been given such coverage since Murtha, though once in favor of the war, had long been critical of it. Public Eye linked to Glenn Reynolds saying just that. I didn’t weigh in on that and still won’t, not having studied the quotes.

So now Vaughn mashes this up with an argument over what is newsworthy and who can say what is newsworthy and whether making that call can be seen in this case as evidence of bias:

Now here’s where I have problems with attacks on the idea that the media can achieve a perspective that is unbiased, if not totally objective: If we can agree that there is something called “newsworthy,” then Murtha’s speech qualified.

But, Vaughn, it is a matter of degree, wouldn’t you agree? Was it news, big news, or the top news story in the nation? Couldn’t reasonable people disagree about that?

But, no, Vaughn seems to say it is an absolute — in fact, he attacks me as a relativist, even though I hadn’t even weighed in on the matter.

Jarvis isn’t alone in making the argument for the death of “objectivity” as an idea but since he’s a friend, we’ll pick on him. In Jarvis-world, with no objective criteria for judging events, how does one argue with the conservative advocate who says Murtha’s speech was not news? You can’t, because there’s no common meaning to the word, “news.” It’s total relativism, it trivializes everything and ignores the real world, commonly understood.

That is why we call it news judgment, Vaughn: because people judge it. And we’ve both worked in enough newsrooms to know that there are plenty of disagreements about that judgement, even among the supposed pros at making those decisions. And behind every one of those decisions comes — let’s not call it bias — perspective. That could be the perspective of experience in journalism. It could be the perspective of politics. But it’s not as if you can just feed the news into an algorithm and get universally accepted news judgment. That’s naive.

Vaughn doesn’t stop there. Oh, no, he keeps driving without brakes:

Advocacy that tries to convince you that the Murtha speech wasn’t news is Orwellian, it’s dishonest. An advocate who will argue that Murtha is wrong, misguided or even a pant-load is honest. But in Jarvis-world, you can’t make distinctions like that because, well, everything is relative. Mostly, the Murtha-isn’t-news drumbeat comes from ideologues who, in days of yore, would have been printing pamphlets, distributing fliers or attending demonstrations. It’s nothing new and nothing reserved for one viewpoint or another.

Whoa, fella. When did I become Big Brother? I had nothing to do with this argument and you’re roping me into this without saying that. I wouldn’t call that fair and balanced. And, again, I think you’re misrepresenting what I say about objectivity and transparency in journalism.

In any case, something sure got in Vaughn’s craw. I don’t really know what it is or why. So I wish I knew more about that perspective. Case in point.

But at least he is acting like a blogger, which is what I suggested he do in advice Vaughn quotes. I said when Public Eye started, vowing to be objective:

Try this on for size: I think there’s no such thing as an objective blogger. Or you’re probably not blogging. You’re probably not talking with people, eye to eye. We’re about to kill the myth that journalists can be thoroughly objective; let’s not start trying to accrete that artificial ethic to blogs.

Oh, yes, Vaughn is plenty opinionated. And that’s a good thing.

: LATER: Jay Rosen reacts to Vaughn in the comments:

You have fallen for your own deceptions, Vaughn, casting yourself as the defender of order and others as the bringers of chaos, instead of trying to describe two different ways of ordering the world, both of which have their chaotic contradictions.

Bill Burnham has a good post about Google Base, insisting that it will change the world, or at least part of it. He says it’s all about RSS feeds into a gigantic XML data base that will extrude all kinds of neat new sausages. I await Part II.

Meanwhile, Olivier Travers says that surely Google will open up Base:

…it’s very early to make a call about Google’s intent. I’d say they want to give themselves a headstart in terms of surfacing Google Base content across their services (e.g. Local) but they’ll probably expose it to the outside world sooner or later. Not doing it seems not only at odds with their roots but more importantly it would leave them vulnerable to a more open joint effort by Microsoft and Yahoo, not to speak of countless smaller competitors.

My issue is: Why not open it up now? Why not publish the data format and API? Why not let us in on their intention? Instead, by playing the mysterious hard-to-get game, Google is mimicking Microsoft, the borg: You’ll do what we say because we say so. Once again, Google has succeeded thanks to the very openness of the internet. It should be open, in turn.

Here’s what Ethan would do if he bought a newspaper, starting with this:

1) Take the third floor (newsroom). Move them out and cut some staff. Put them in a big warehouse type space that was computers on the outside wall, and conversation areas inside. Make this warehouse in a public space, open to the public. Put in a coffee bar, open wifi and invite the consumer to come in. Leverage the content the consumer creates in this environment so that the reader is also the (co) writer.

Brightcove, Jeremy Allaire’s new video-serving company, had lots of big news today: investments from AOL, Barry Diller’s IAC, Hearst, and Allen & Co. They also made a deal with AOL to distribute its video there. (Full disclosure: I think I’m on Brightcove’s board of advisors and I’ve introduced them to some companies.)

What I like about Brightcove — besides Allaire — is that they enable many models: ad-supported video, pay-per-view video, subscription video, and free video (that is, paid for by the producer). They make publishing and playing the video easy thanks to copious Flash (remember that Allaire sold his company to Macromedia and was there for sometime).

What will be interesting is seeing how this works with all the other means of video distribution that are popular: Bittorrent, of course; plus iTunes; plus TiVo to iPods and PCs…. There is no question that there is pentup demand for video among consumers and even more among advertisers, who’ve wanted to turn the internet into TV from day one. They want the motion and excitement of video. They also want the ease of buying TV upfront, but those days are over. Over.

Says Iconoculture’s newsletter today:

Last month ABC and Apple started offering next-day downloads of major primetime programs. It started with Desperate Housewives and Lost for $1.99 per episode, and sparked a reaction (long in the works) from NBC/DirecTV and CBS/Comcast to offer similar content on demand for only $.99. Then, just this week, AOL/Time Warner decided to up the ante by opening up their back catalog of television content on AOL’s online network for free.

How did this on-demand flash happen? Wasn’t this level of à la carte TV consumer control and access supposed to be years off? No; not really. Consumers have already been building their own level of mix-and-match programming and TV personalization with services like BitTorrent and a flood of new independent and user-created content via the web. Learning from the music industry’s late 90’s struggles with Napster and its brethren, broadcasters and studios are offering their content before consumers get too far ahead of them.

From a TV ad and affiliate sales point of view, these developments are like reversing the rotation of the Earth, flipping the script in terms of traditional appointment viewing assumptions. What that means for the next several years is a continued shift toward far more targeted marketing campaigns and a dependence on consumers to invite ads rather than merely accept the ones pushed to them. To get those invitations, advocacy, trust, and customization are the price of entry.

My emphasis.

: Frank Barnako writes about this today and is nice enough to link to my exploding-tv posts. The newer ones are here; the older ones (from the old blog platform), starting in June last year, are here.

: Now Viacom is in talks with Google about video search and VOD. [via Thomas Hawk]

Good on the Open Source Media/OSM/Pajamas Media folks for deciding to go back to their Pajamas moniker to do so with humor and grace:

So how did this happen in the first place? Back at the beginning, certain, shall we say, paternalistically minded parties (i.e., the guys in suits) decided that we should act like grownups, and being as yet somewhat immature—at least as businesspeople–we did as we were told.

Which is how, one day, we ended up sitting around a conference table listening to representatives from a “branding” company. What followed is still a bit of a nightmarish blur, but it involved a PowerPoint presentation on the history of names, and such probing questions as, “If you were an animal, what animal would you be?” (Which is how we almost ended up as Jellyfish Media.)

Yes, sometimes having money can cause more problems than not having it. If you can’t afford a branding agency, then you trust yourself. And that, above all, is what blogs are about, eh?

The NY Post’s Page Six speculates about Judy Miller’s severence package with guesses as high as six years’ salary and a lifetime of health insurance. I don’t care about the money but I still want to know what limits both sides agreed to on what they can say.

There’s a generous dollop of irony in Kit Seelye’s profile of The Washington Post’s and CNN’s Howie Kurtz today. She raises questions about his conflict of interest writing about the media and the media companies of which he is a part (he and other defend his performance on those scores).

But the truth is that The Times needs its own Howie Kurtz: a strong voice who will cover, analyze, and criticize the paper as well as media, and not just the current combination of a brothy public editor and the reporter given the bad-luck assignment of covering the latest dustup at the paper. Seelye would be good that that if she were given the chance. There are the sprinkles atop that dollop of irony.