Michael:

Thanks for taking notice of the news of our blog channel. I have a different message for Blogads, however, which is that we're on the same side. BURST! represents nearly 2000 web publishers of varying shapes and sizes with one thing in common: passion. Blogs are a leading, highly interactive example of passion at work online, but they are only one example of the urge to publish and communicate that all of BURST!'s publishers - and many others - share.

In that regard, Kyocera is the real story here. It has figured out that the Internet provides it with access to the opinion-leaders and prime-movers that can help launch new products and features into the marketplace, and sustain brands, through word of mouth.

Is this really news to anybody? No. We've understood the value of opinion-leaders to marketing for years (generations?). We've just never been able to scale opinion-leader media opportunities - which tend to be smaller and more vertical - to the extent we'd like until the arrival of the Internet and supporting players such as Blogads and BURST!, which help, in this case, aggregate highly vertical, qualified web sites into packages.

Until the Internet, marketers had to rely on purveyors of general interest content for efficient reach. Undoing that dependancy is what takes so long and what contributes to the disparity between the amount of online ad revenue and the size of the online audience. Online audiences have fanned out across the Internet in pursuit of what interests them. Major advertisers have remained cautiously clustered around a few large web sites. Accordingly, Kyocera's investment into the blog category was, we thought, noteworthy. My hope is that it results in more business for Blogads, BURST! and everyone that is working to support a New Media economy that is more passionate, more relevant and driven from the bottom, up.

Cheers!

Jarvis Coffin
BURST! Media, LLC
"What do you really care about?"

Jarvis--
Great to hear from you and congrats on the Kyocera deal. My question for our audience is: what does Burst offer to political bloggers and what might it mean for political campaigns?
Micah

Ah, well, I think the themes that informed Kyocera's decision to buy advertising on blogs apply just as much to political campaigns. Political campaigns should take account of the intimacy and relevance of blogs, as well as the plethora of other content rich environments available on the web, in order to reach the opinion-leaders and prime-movers in the marketplace. And they can do that efficiently today, online, helped by aggregators like BURST! and places like PersonalDemocracy.com.

Are political campaigns doing that any more than brand marketers today? No. And perhaps less, as the experience of 2004 showed us. Political campaigners have remained as cautiously clustered around a the same few media choices as most brand advertisers, online and off. They buy television despite a drumbeat of data that indicates TV audiences are dwindling.

Personaldemocracy.com is a great theme for more than democracy. It's about new media and a new information economy. In my view we can swap the word democracy for media or, better, network. We are all personal networks today and much less part of some homogenous tune-in audience at 8:00 p.m. on Channel 4.

That's what it means for political campaigns. And whether political campaigns like it or not, it means the same for soap.

Cheers!

Jarvis Coffin
BURST! Media, LLC
"What do you really care about?"

Interesting comment regarding the connection between traditional and political marketing. So often, I hear campaigns say that the Internet might be great for selling soap, but selling a candidate is different. However, I've found many studies, mostly from Dynamic Logic, that prove how CPG (consumer packaged goods) and political advertising rely on the same type of metrics. Brand awareness = name recognition. Intend to buy = intend to support.

It was encouraging to read this week that CPG marketers are considering a move away from print and toward the Internet. Check it out.

One point the article mentions is worth quoting here: "Based on a survey of 1,803 U.S. adults who consume household information online, the study found that approximately 44 percent of respondents prefer the Internet as their leading information channel, compared to 20 percent who prefer magazines and television."

We keep seeing similar studies, mostly from Pew, indicating that more and more Americans are relying on the Internet for political information. We'll just have to wait and see if marketers start responding to these studies showing that their target audiences can be reached more effectively and efficiently using the web.

I don't know if you can use "Cluetrain" as a verb (waddayathink, David?) but it strikes me that you can only take the parallels to selling soap so far before you butt up against the same human reactions against being marketed to. That is to say, the whole notion of "selling" (i.e. packaging) a candidate to voters is in trouble. Well before the Internet blossomed, we saw a rising revulsion to "slick" "plastic" "on message" candidates who said whatever they thought people wanted to hear and stood for little on their own. Remember 1992, the year of Ross Perot (and Jerry Brown and Paul Tsongas)?

The same way we are all discovering how to unearth the truth about the products people want to sell us (ePinions.com) or to rank the reliability of sellers (eBay), we're also evolving ways to sniff out the BS from the politicians and their handlers. It's not nearly as far along, that's all.

Thought I'd provide a quick link to a Mediapost story today that highlights the reasons why we need folks like Blogads and BURST! to help facilitate advertising on blogs. Seems like the folks at Google AdSense haven't yet figured out a way to semantically analyze site content to provide accurate partner links on sites within its network.

Mediapost: Blog Ads Hit Rough Patches

Well, Jerry Brown did use his revolutionary approach to win... the mayorship of Oakland.

How many people were revulsed to the "on message" candidate Bush? Well, 59 million people weren't...

The packaging and the selling of the President will continue for the forseeable future.

Jon