BuzzMachine

Now this is targeted advertising: I was looking at Platial — the site that lets you push pins into Google Maps — for something I’m writing and I found an ad there for the Sony GPS add-on to cameras, which lets you record your location with your photo, a cool device I saw in action at the Guardian. It’s perfect targeting — and, I’m sure, not expensive marketing — and it struck me that no Google algorithm would have made that placement. In fact, Platial would know best what plays with its audience. This reminds me of the discussion of sell-side advertising, the idea of the publisher picking the ads because it’s the publisher who best understands the audience and the context, and the advertiser pays on performance. It still makes sense; we just need the infrastructure to enable it.

The click-through will soon be dead or at least seriously wounded. Here’s a case in point:

In this morning’s NY Times, Stuart Elliott writes with unquestioning, even breathless acceptance (yet again) about another advertiser’s idiotic idea: a social site based around a cookie.

Now why the hell would anyone with half a life go to a site from a cookie company telling her how to make friends? Why, once there, would such a person tolerate such drivel as this:

10 tips for connecting…. 3 Practice random acts of connecting. Make an acquaintance more of a friend by inviting someone you want to know better for tea and cookies… 4 Make a friendship file. Just as you might for travel or shopping, clip and save items that remind you of a friend or activity ideas for future friend dates, and then refer to it when plan time comes…. 7 Have a laugh. After an ear and a shoulder to cry on, the gift of comic relief is one of the best you can give a friend in need. If humor’s not your forte, just commit one silly joke to memory to break out on these occasions. (Here’s one: Question: What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back to you? Answer: A stick.)

Oh, beat me with it.

But the ad agency made a fortune convincing the advertiser that they needed to get social. And the advertiser spent a fortune — $2-3 million, says Elliott — licensing this claptrap content and making this stupid site and advertising their advertising. And their PR company made a fortune writing press releases about it. And Elliott made, if not a fortune, then probably too much money yesterday rewriting that press release.

But it only shows the absurdity of such social brand advertising. Of course, this goes back to advertisers saying that they want their brands to be associated with certain attributes (cookies=connections) and so they advertise next to certain content; that is the brand advertising that makes the magazine and TV businesses churn. God bless it. Then advertisers wanted more control over content and so God the devil created advertorials. Then came the internet, where advertisers believed they could avoid all that damned media and expense by creating their own content: cookie sites and alleged underwear humor and chicken soup Goldfish for the soul, all linked today in Elliott’s story. And then came social: another buzzword, another revenue stream. Says Elliott:

Ad spending on Web sites like Bebo, Buzznet, Facebook and MySpace — by companies like Blockbuster, Circuit City, Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Sony — is expected to total $1.2 billion this year, according to eMarketer, a research company, and climb to $1.9 billion in 2008.

But think about it: You’re on one of those social sites, already being social with your friends, and so why are you going to follow a link and click to a cookie site to tell you how to be social? You’re not. And so the cookie company is, I predict, going to flop at its cookie site (once today’s rush of Times traffic subsides) and then it will declare that social doesn’t work and isn’t worth anything and it will return to buying upfront TV.

But, of course, they are doing this the wrong way — trying to make us come to them, and for a stupid reason — and they’re measuring the wrong thing — the act of coming to them: the clickthrough. Yes, that’s how all advertisers measure their the performance, the return on investment, the value of their marketing (whether or not they pay on clicks, they measure the value on clicks).

But now we move past the internet-as-a-bunch-of-sites to the internet as a place where people connect. Sorry, cookie company, but the people do this just fine without you and your silly advice. In fact, the internet always has been a place where people connect, only we — and I include me — in media and marketing were to egotistical to see that. So rather than trying to make people come to you and rather than trying to make them go to media sites where your brand is associated with the content there, you now need to go to where your customers are and not to irritate them with advertising but to help them with service, not to barge in but to be invited in. That’s what makes Facebook’s new recommendation advertising engine so intriguing: once you see your friends like something, what better advertising than that? Why click through; that’s already ad nirvana, right?

So the story about the cookie connection site is not that another clever advertiser has discovered social. The story about the cookie connection site is that it is the last absurd gasp of a dying media model, the idea that you can create advertising so compelling that people will want to click to come to you. Come now.

My Guardian column this week expands on a conclusion of mine about media from my Dell reporting. Snippet:

As the media become more dependent on advertising, so advertising becomes less dependent on the media. With the recent death of the New York Times’ pay service, TimesSelect, and the rumoured razing of the Wall Street Journal’s pay wall, any final hopes of readers paying for content are fading. We prophets of free content are being proven right - whether we like it or not. Advertising is all we’ll have to support content and media. . . .

But the real threat to the advertising gravy train comes not from any change in media, but from a fundamental shift in the relationship between companies and customers that has been made possible by the internet. This hit me like a fist in the face when I went to Texas to interview Michael Dell for Business Week magazine, and to write the coda to my very public blog battle with the company. . . .

Dell’s executives say their new problem is managing and spreading all this knowledge from customers. Its chief marketer said his new opportunity is to rely on customer-advocates to sell computers. And Michael Dell predicted a future of “co-creation of products and services” with customers.

There it is: the fist. Dell and its customers are collaborating on the creation of content, media and marketing - without content, media or marketing companies. Advertising is no one’s first choice as the basis of a relationship. For marketers, it’s expensive and inefficient. For customers, it’s invasive and annoying. And targeted advertising is only slightly more efficient and slightly less annoying. Clearly, the direct relationship between a customer and a company is preferable. But that direct connection cuts out the middlemen - that is the media.

(Alternate permalink)

So when someone came along who actually managed to compete with and even frighten Google — namely, Facebook — how is Google competing? By going open. There’s a lesson in that for the rest of us.

I keep saying that media companies should ask WWGD – what would Google do — in formulating their digital strategies. Well, in Google’s Open Social, we see that the best competition against a growing monopoly is openness.

So how should we compete with Google or at least challenge its monopoly? Openness. I’ve argued for sometime that we need an open-source ad infrastructure. If the rest of the world other than Google — that is, those who have the other half of advertising Google doesn’t yet have — can gather together and create standards, then Google would be faced with the same decision Facebook is now faced with: whether to use those standards. What organized Facebook’s foes? Ironically, it was Google. Who could organize the nonGoogle ad universe? I see no one on the horizon. That’s why Google keeps growing. We’re letting them.

Bob Garfield goes properly ballistic against Comcast. We all have our horrible stories of waiting for the cable guy but this is a classic and Bob does a good and anally retentive job of chronicling the horror, the horror. The only thing that would have made it better is if he had recorded it — Bob is, after all, a Big Media Guy — and turned it into YouTube hilarity.

Call me an optimist, but I believe that every company — every industry — that makes its money by screwing its customers is doomed. We, the customers, can now coalesce and gang up on them and show them who’s boss. Yes, I’m thinking Dell Hell and its apparent turnaround. But this works only if the companies live in fear of losing us — that is, if they have competition. And this, of course, is why cable companies, phone companies, insurance companies, power companies, and other monopolies and duopolies — not to mention government — keep thinking they have us by the balls, out of which they can squeeze their money. But I think their day will come. New technologies could kill or at least bring competition into telecommunications. The insurance mess is finally going to get so bad that government will have to step in to fix it. Politicians themselves will have to learn that we can use these new tools to defeat them. The question is how we can speed this process up.

Well, Bob Garfield is an expert in media — as the cohost of On the Media — and also in advertising — as the critic at Ad Age. So I’ll throw the challenge back to you, Bob: How can we set the agenda on our dear communications ball-squeezers? How can we make their lives a living hell, like they make ours? How can we put pressure on those in power to take the power away from these horrible companies? How can we show their would-be competitors that there’s a great opportunity to come in and displace these fat and venal fools?

Let’s invent antiadvertising. Or maybe it’s unadvertising. Or customertising. If they can use media and messaging, so can we.

So, Bob, why don’t you make a commercial — not just a blog post, but a cool and slick ad — telling people why Comcast must die (your words). If it’s good — which, if you make it, it must be — and if it says something people want to hear and say themselves — and we know everyone shares this sentiment — then they will pass it around. Thank you, Google and YouTube. Maybe we can make a contest of it: make commercials against your least favorite companies. Free creative. Free media.

What if customertising takes over and beats advertising? Then we’d all go seek out customerisements and the ones with the fewest screeds out there must be OK.

I hate to be so negative about this. But as you can see in Bob’s screedlog, as we all know, the anger and frustration just build up until you have to scream.

Well, from now on, instead of screaming, expose the fools. Record your entire encounter with the cable company — every phone call, every visit — and use their failures against them. Our day has come. Or is coming.

: LATER: I missed the obvious name — customercials.

In its story about the latest failure of AOL to find a strategy, the Times repeats a bit of big-media conventional wisdom that should be abandoned: that big is where it’s at and portals are a winning strategy. The Times calls the failure of the AOL portal strategy a “quirk” when it should call this a lesson:

The company’s challenges highlight one of the quirks of today’s Internet market. As advertising is moving from offline media to the Internet at a rapid clip, portals, which command some of the biggest audiences online, should be among the top beneficiaries. Instead, the travails of the mass market portals like AOL, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft, indicate a decline in power.

Once and for all: The size of the site doesn’t matter to advertisers. Oh, yes, they still think its matters and for a time that’s still how they buy, by reflex. But get this straight: Just because a site has 100 million users, that doesn’t mean 10o million people see your ad. It’s not TV. Repeat: It’s not TV. The only people who will see your ad are the ones who see the page on which it appears. If you buy 10,000 impressions, aka eyeballs, you can buy them on a big site or a bunch of small sites, it doesn’t matter. Big brings no advantage other than convenience and it also brings some disadvantages like inefficiency and price. This is the essence of the change in the economic model of media. Post that on your wall and stare at it.

Here’s a look at Google’s new ad form on YouTube. Slick. (via Black20)

For all the fuss over the Federated Media advertorial mess, one underlying message here is that advertisers are coming to care about being close to us — us, the Users or Consumer who Generate Media. They’re coming around slowly, but they’re coming around.

I just saw a Piper Jaffray PowerPoint (sorry, I lost the link) that said that time spent on “user-generated content” sites soared from 3 percent in April of 2005 to 31 percent now: a tenfold increase in just two years and a now huge proportion of time spent online.

That means that advertisers can no longer ignore the content we make, even if they are still scared of it.

And a survey reported in Ad Age last week shows some trepidation still. The Ad Age reporter was unimpressed that 12 percent of senior marketers found consumer-generated and new media “very important.” But I was impressed that 57 percent found it very or something important. Marketers’ main reason for using new media/CGM was to be innovative and ahead of the competition in pushing the latest marketing trend, cited by 36% of marketers. Many also said CGM saves money compared with traditional advertising and marketing, a reason cited by 32% of respondents.

Yet the survey showed that the advertising industry is not taking advantage of new media/CGM. One reason may be hesitation to give the consumer more control. Only 22% said they were “very willing” to allow consumers more control. Others said it could harm their businesses and there is no clear return on investment.

Fools. They still don’t see that we are in control.

And the World Editors Forum blog reports that, according to Hitwise, YouTube is about to surpass the BBC in UK home page visitors. And thanks to MySpace et al, entertainment websites overtook retail and classified traffic.

You just can’t escape us.

In the comments on the post/book immediately below, my friend Fred Wilson said I was sticking with old-school notions. I left this comment in response and think it’s worth bringing the discussion out here:

In journalism education, I talk a lot about the need to rewrite and break rules, to end old assumptions, to work with new realities. I talk about it far too much for the taste of some (many, actually).

But I also talk about the values that are worth maintaining and preserving. Credibility is the essence of that. Not selling your voice is the key to credibility. It is the foundation of independence. There are other worthy values I talk about, too: fairness, accuracy, completeness. And this week on Newshour, I included in the discussion the ethics I have learned from the blogosphere: the ethic of the correction, of the link, and of transparency.

In the professional arena, I also talk a lot about the need to reexamine the wall between church and state, the need for journalists themselves to take responsibility for the sustainability of journalism.

But that makes is all the more important that we understand how to maintain independence and credibility. That makes these selected “old-school” values all the more critical.

It doesn’t matter whether one considers oneself a journalist, though. Credibility is the same for all of us. Our readers expect us to speak with them directly, as trusted friends. My neighbors aren’t paid to speak to me. No one is (yet) trying to buy their voices. I expect the same here.

I don’t want to tear down all the old schools. I want to update them.

And I clearly believe in the importance of advertiser support for media, including the media of the people. But that, too, is why I think it is important to have these discussions openly and in detail, so that bloggers will build and maintain their credibility. For if they lose their credibility, they lose their value both to their readers and to their advertisers. That much has not changed: Advertisers, including Microsoft, want to be associated with people of who have the respect of their shared public.

Federated Media stepped in it with their latest campaign, getting some of its bloggers to issue not so bon mots on behalf of a not so bon advertiser, Microsoft.

I tried to warn Federated when I adamantly turned down two prior similar campaigns, telling them that this would reflect poorly on the bloggers who do it, possibly on bloggers as a whole, on the network itself, and in the end on the advertisers. But they kept trying to push the boundaries, because that’s what advertisers and thus sales people do.

So ultimately, this is a cautionary tale for all bloggers who take ads: You must set your own boundaries and not let them be pushed. When you do — whatever those boundaries are — that is the very definition of selling out.

In each of these cases, the advertiser’s effort is to get more closely associated with us, our content, our reputations, our brands. They’d like get into our pants mouths. They want us to speak their names. Nicely. Or at least be near them, associated with them. This happens at every editorial product I know and it becomes incumbent upon their editors to resist and to protect their integrity from integration — if, indeed, that matters to them (and in many cases, such as entertainment shows — Coke glasses on the American Idol desk — it doesn’t). Advertisers can’t get us to endorse their products directly — unless we’re PayPerPosties or actors — and so they try to find some way that we can say something nice somewhere else. That’s what happened in this case, after much Talmudic wrestling that still strikes me as the congregant asking the rabbi for permission to have an affair… with a shiksa… on a pig farm… on a Saturday… for money.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now: The rules are obvious. Our readers should not be confused about the source of what they read. If it is paid for, that should be labeled as advertising. In editorial environments, our voice and our space cannot be bought — or it is not editorial; it is, by definition, advertising. Not every media property needs to follow these rules; entertainment, for example, is not editorial. But this is the essential rule that allows us to accept advertising to support publications without losing our credibility.

First, I’ll give the background of the current case to those who, having taken a weekend day off, had not seen it on Techmeme. And then (at the three asterisks below) I will give you my history and the emails I sent to Federated on this last year.

The current case: On Friday, Nick Denton at Valleywag gave proper a tongue-lashing to Federated and the prominent bloggers in the ad network — Om Malik, Michael Arrington, Fred Wilson, Paul Kedrosky, Matt Marshall (plus Richard MacManus, Mike Davidson, and Federated founder John Battelle) — who agreed to give pappy quotes over their names for a platitudinous campaign about business that is “people-ready,” said quotes appearing on a minisite Federated made for Microsoft and on banner ads. We, the public, are supposed to become so engaged in this fit of interactivity that we vote for our favorite cant (does the winner go on a bumper sticker? a t-shirt? a blimp?) and submit our own people-ready stories. If this felt any more stretched, it’d be taffy. But note how they try to get the bloggers to lend their names and voices even if not on their sites and not about the product but still under the advertiser’s brand. Didn’t fool Denton:

I can’t blame Battelle’s team for latching on to this idea. The campaign is slick; and Microsoft is a deep-pocketed client. But it’s disappointing that so many of his most reputable writers have signed on as spokespeople. One would have thought that tech opinion-leaders as influential as Om Malik and Paul Kedrosky would ration their credibility more carefully, and reserve it for companies and products for which they felt real enthusiasm.

This is why I love the Brits: understatement.

Om Malik, to his considerable credit, back-pedaled quickly:

So without making any excuses, to my readers, if participation in Microsoft’s advertising campaign has made you doubt my integrity even for a second, then I apologize.

I have requested Federated Media, our sales partners, suspend the campaign on our network of sites, and they have. We are turning off any such campaigns that might be running on our network. Would I participate in a similar campaign again? Nothing is worth gambling the readers’ trust. Conversational marketing is a developing format, and clearly the rules are not fully defined. If the readers feel a line was crossed, I’ll will defer to their better judgement.

The fact of the matter is that the original premise of the campaign was to give my thoughts by what People Ready meant to me – it wasn’t an endorsement of a specific Microsoft product. (You can read it here, and judge for yourself.) Nor did my words run in any portion of our editorial space. Microsoft asked us to join a conversation, and we did. I wasn’t paid to participate in the conversation, but Microsoft ran an ad-campaign that paid us on the basis of CPM.

But today the campaign, which has been running for close to two months, brought up doubt about my editorial integrity for some of you.

In the future I shall focus on what I know best – reporting and writing.

Good on Om. He was clearly seduced by some silver-tongued ad sales guy but has thought better of it. So has Paul Kedrosky: “…I still should have taken more time and said “No” to an ad whose style could so easily be misconstrued.” Fred Wilson has not thought better of it and called Nick so old school for sticking to these rules (Fred, some rules are worth keeping). Ditto Michael Arrington, who tells critics to “pound sand” and argues that it’s clearly an ad. Absolutely right, but it’s still an ad with your words in it. Except then Mike reveals these aren’t necessarily their words: “…generally FM suggests some language and we approve or tweak it to make it less lame. The ads go up, we get paid.”

Clearly, Federated has not thought better of it. Their new VP of author relations, Neil Chase, a topnotch editor who just left the New York Times for this gig, responded to Denton trying to justify this self-delusion by taking lipstick and writing the label “conversational marketing” on the pig:

ValleyWag today suggests that one of FM’s conversational marketing campaigns is hurting the editorial integrity of our authors. It says that Microsoft paid them to write, which is simply not true. They were invited to join a conversation with readers about Microsoft’s new theme, and they did so, but they didn’t write about it on their blogs. The only money they get from Microsoft is from ads running on their sites, for which they’re paid by the page view.

Well, but they were paid. Mike Arrington’s laudably candid on that point. They were paid for the media rather than the creative, as we say. In publishing, we call this “value added.” Some media companies insist that they won’t negotiate their rates but then they throw in extra stuff — parties, goodies, extra ads elsewhere — to essentially lower the price. The value-added in this case was the bloggers’ words. Neil continues in his comment to Nick:

Welcome to the birth of conversational marketing.

It’s making people like you and me, who came from the world of traditional newspapers, have to learn about three-way conversations. We have already witnessed the evolution of the two-way conversation among authors and readers that is replacing old-fashioned one-way journalism. Even our old employers (yours at the Financial Times, mine at The New York Times) are now actively bringing their readers into two-way conversations.

So the next step, naturally, is for marketers to want to join the conversation. It can be done in ethical, responsible ways, and FM’s authors are among the first to figure out how to do it.

Uh, Neil, I think you’re jumping to a conclusion there and if you listen to the conversation about this “conversation,” you might think otherwise. Hear Charles Cooper at CNet: “Why would ostensibly independent voices come across as Microsoft shills?” Here’s Ashkan Karbasfrooshan joining the discussion: “Frankly, it makes me distance from MSFT, dislike Battelle’s tactic (note singular John) and distrust what the bloggers have to say.” Neil continues:

We’re carefully expanding conversational marketing based on all kinds of new ideas that are coming from authors, marketers and our sales reps. We’re drafting a set of principles for conversational marketing that will help everyone, inside FM and across the industry, frame the discussion about how we do this the right way. And we’re taking care at every step of the process to make sure we don’t compromise the editorial integrity of our authors.

I’d say it should have been drafted long ago.

I pulled out email from September 11, 2006, from a Federated rep trying to get me into a similar program, this one with Cisco trying to get such bromides from bloggers for its effort to associate itself with the phrase “human network.” Worse, in this case, they wanted to write a Wikipedia article about the network to get their brand in there. I call that knowledge spam. I was told that if I chose to participate, my definition of “human network” — which I would deliver after they gave me a “seed definition” — would appear in an ad on Buzzmachine. The net to me for this opportunity would have been $559. I said no. And I gave them some free advice:

This will get them KILLED in the net. It is wikipedia spam. It is not transparent. It is wrong for them and wrong for me and I would say for FM.

I was told in email that the client decided to change how the Wikipedia entry was made, but they still made it. The original is here; the latest here. [*See note below.] I pressed on in a subsequent email:

I’m afraid they are still on the dark side. You just can’t put something with commercial motive into Wikipedia. Admitting it is hardly better; it is still a crime. The Wikipedians and bloggers will attack hard and they will deserve what they get.

And I cannot stand behind an advertiser getting me to write something for pay. In most quarters — in quality, reliable, editorial, credible blogs — that is equally a crime. You cannot buy my editorial voice or space; that is the very essence of church/state in any journalistic context; that is what I have told everyone who has ever worked for me whether on a newspaper, on a magazine, or online. . . .

I want to stay as far away from this as possible. And I will still counsel that FM should also. If you’re going to sell your soul, I suggest doing it for a fuck of a lot more than $559! Not that someone cannot choose PR and press-release writing as a career, but I would hope that is not what FM stands for.

This tactic came up again in a campaign for a gadget (I don’t know whether the campaign ever ran, so I’ll keep the brand confidential). This time, we were expected to write directly about the product with positive sentiment. I’d say that’s the definition of a product endorsement. I turned it down and responded: “This is pay-for-post and I will not do it and condemned it today on my blog.” They came back and said, well, it’s not an endorsement but a personal anecdote of a time when I appreciated the kind of ability this device afforded — if I owned that brand of device. I came back and said: “I fear that this could blow up in Federated’s face.” I laid out the same rules I repeated above and added: “It’s one matter for an advertiser to pick up something we say as a blurb; happens to movie critics all the time. It’s another to assign and pay for a blogger to write something about the product. You can say that’s not endorsement but I’d say it sure smells like it.”

My real advice to them, relevant today:

I suggest that Federated have a policy on the relationship of its bloggers with advertisers. I would argue that in the church-v-state of this media and journalism world, you need to be the state and create a wall that allows us to be the church. You have the contact with the advertisers; we don’t. And I would further suggest that the editorial voice and space of Federated bloggers is not for sale. Whether you want that policy is up to you and the FM bloggers; but that will remain my policy. I think there is an opportunity to pull up above others and work on a higher plain. I also think that having such a policy makes it easier with advertisers: You have something to point to. I’d be happy to help with brainstorming such a policy. . . . My two cents. Just trying to be helpful. . .

Never had that brainstorming.

So now I’m disagreeing with myself. In that last email, I put the onus on Federated to come up with that policy. And though I still think that would be principled and wise, I shift at the top of this too-long post when I say that I now believe it’s the bloggers who must make these calls. That’s because advertisers will be advertisers; they will try to push for more integration with us (and we should beware taking that as flattery). And sales people will be sales people; they will try hard to get the sale. So we bloggers are left, inevitably, with the need to say no. I also generally oppose efforts to create omnibus codes. I can wish others would operate in a certain way and I can judge them accordingly. But I’ll just speak for myself with my advertising policy in greater detail:

1. My voice is not for sale. No one can pay me to say what they want me to say.
2. My editorial space is not for sale. I accept advertising and it must be clearly labeled.
3. When I am paid to write (as in a freelance article) or to speak, I will still determine what I say and I will disclose that relationship.
4. I will attempt to disclose relevant financial relationships so you are free to judge me and my words accordingly.
5. In some cases, such a relationship will prevent me from speaking on a subject (as in talking in detail about an employer). However, I will not be compelled to speak because of such a relationship.
6. If I say something openly and freely here, it may be quoted by a commercial entity (the blurb) but I will not be compensated for that.
7. My acceptance of advertising here does not constitute an endorsement of the advertiser. However, I will at times turn down advertising I find unacceptable.
8. I recognize that many blog, vlogs, etc. do not pretend to live by editorial standards and that is their right and freedom. But when they say some things, I will need to take when they say with appropriate salt.
9. I have financial relationships with others who do not follow these rules and in many cases I do not believe these rules apply to them (e.g., entertainment). I enjoy and respect many sites and products that do not follow these rules, but I expect to be able to find out what rules they operate by. I believe one’s rules and relationships should be disclosed.
10. I do not believe I have a price at which I would sell out. But if I did, I can say I certainly haven’t seen it yet.

Some more blog comment on this. From Sam Harrelson:

And here’s the lesson to be learned from all of this, whether you’re in the Technorati 100 or Technorati 100,000…

Pay Per Post, Review Me, or accepting money in exchange for some sort of content production (whether a full post or a small block of text) comes across as slimy to your readers, hurts your credibility and does more long term brand damage to your blog and your brand than short term (monetary) good.

The only reason to engage in these sorts of schemes is to make a few quick bucks… but it’s not worth your blog’s soul. . . .

In our post-modern world, ideas such as “trust,” “objectivity,” “disclosure,” and “reliability” have been turned over and rendered subjective. That doesn’t mean that these terms are meaningless, it means that things like trust are now subjective in the eyes of the beholders. Authorial (or editorial), on the other hand, is meaningless. How I perceive you means everything.

He said it better — and briefer — than I did.

Kent Newsome:

t’s about whether or not you want to be the blogosphere equivalent of Suzanne Somers hawking a ThighMaster. It’s about the crossroads between cash and credibility.

All we have as bloggers is our reputation and our track record. No ad campaign is worth risking that, regardless of whether it crosses any ethical line. This is more about common sense than ethics.

Dave Winer says:

… But to imply that everyone knows they’re doing it is wrong. I didn’t. I’m sure others didn’t as well.

Second, and this is the really important one. It’s one thing to let Microsoft buy space on your site (it’s called advertising) and quite another to accept Microsoft money for words coming out of your mouth. Next month when we read something positive on these sites about Microsoft, how are we supposed to know if it’s an opinion, or just another example of being paid to say something supportive of Microsoft.

The only one of the people involved who showed any interest in what others think is Om Malik, and even his interest was conditional. In public writing, what people think of your writing is very important. They may not agree with you, they may not like what you say, they may not like you, but you want to be sure they know where you’re coming from. Any doubt about that removes value from your work. Do it often enough and it removes all value.

Mike says that this discussion cost him money that he needs to make payroll. I encourage him to look at a bigger picture. Any cloud over his integrity with readers will have a much bigger impact, imho.

: * LATER: John Battelle left this comment, which he also sent in email:

Jeff -
In fact, on the Cisco campaign, in now way did Cisco spam Wikipedia. They wanted to post a wiki version of their definition, and naturally their first thought was Wikipedia. Thanks to input like yours and many others, they did it on Wikia, the commercial cousin to Wikipedia. In fact, they sought out Jimmy Wales’ advice on the matter. The entry was later put up on Wikipedia by one it its editors, independently. Why? Because Cisco sponsored an honest conversation. Is it somehow illegal for companies to be part of a conversation? I really find that presumption offensive. Why can’t companies, which as the Cluetrain reminds us are just made up of people, be part of a conversation, and invite leader into that conversation? I’ll be posting more on this later, but I wanted to clear that up.

I never said “illegal.” I’m also taken aback by Battelle’s effort to be the offended party. I don’t know who posted the “article” and how it got there, yet it got there and the end result is the same. But there is Battelle’s stand.

: See also Fred Wilson’s response in the comments and my two responses, in turn.

: And here is Battelle’s post defending what he sees as “conversational marketing.” He says it’s new. I think it’s very old: It’s advertorial. I, for one, won’t contribute to advertorials. He also says that advertisers have a right to be part of the conversation. Of course; I don’t hear anyone arguing with that. The question is how they get there.

: THE NEXT DAY: Jackie Danicki asks why I didn’t write about this at the time. I did here. As I explain in the comments on Jackie’s post, I didn’t reveal the parties involved because this was business; they were just pitches at the time; I didn’t think the campaigns had actually gone through (my bad assumption); and I think discussing the issues is what matters here. This isn’t an expose. It’s a necessary discussion for bloggers. See also my response to Scoble on that point in the comments below.

Advertisers continue to pay more for less: TV’s upfront sales look to be up this year. They are no longer limited by the scarcity of broadcast yet they are too lazy or clueless to go put together the less expensive, more targeted, and more efficient alternatives in other media.

: LATER: The Times today says that some of this added revenue is coming from online packages and so good on them for that. But still, advertisers need to start thinking past the scarcity economy. They should want to: it will lower their prices and give them better targeting, less waste.

My friend Dave Morgan says the widget advertising is next. Snips:

Simply put, widgets are the most recent embodiment of highly distributable Web media. Widgets permit users to separate the content from the Web page, permitting users to implant them on all types of pages, from personalized portal home pages to blogs to personal pages on social sites like MySpace or Facebook. I believe that over the next three years, widgets will change online advertising as we know it today. . . .

Are widgets the next search? I don’t think so. However, I do think that the concept of highly portable, object-oriented content that is personally and virally distributed will redefine how we think about Web pages, and how advertisers think about using the Web to communicate and interact with consumers.

That’s part of what I was writing about in my post After the Page: the deconstruction of content as we know it now (pages, sites, URLs) through radical distribution (which will only explode the audience for good content — and that ads that, perhaps, will go with it). This is why the FaceBook platform matters (don’t worry, my Facebook obsession will pass soon — but not yet).

But there’s danger here: I fear a flood of bad widgets from emergency widget brainstorming meetings in media conference rooms across the land: ‘Let’s make widgets out of everything we make! Widgetize the world!’ The best widgets will also interact with the environment in which they find themselves and, simply, will be worth embedding.

: MORE: Thanks to this blogger, who remembered what I wrote better than I did, I rediscovered a related post I wrote two years ago: Feedthink meets Widgethink. Most content is a feed and feeds can fill many widgets and that adds up to a new architecture for pages and content.