For the casual person, the more emails you receive, the more popular you are: normally be a boost to your ego. You’d expect that popular bloggers will be thrilled by this as a recognition of their popularity but 300+ “PR Spam” emails a day can be a little much.

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, is one journalist/blogger that has got fed up. In addition to filtering and blocking out emails, he has made the addresses and domains of these ’spammers’ public in the bid to shame them. This sparked a wave of imitators the most recent being a wiki of PR Spammers by Gina Trapani, of Lifehacker.

Tom Foremski has announced he will only accept pitches via Facebook as has Robert Scoble. Both went as far to say they’ll only listen to their list of friends on Facebook. Bad news for hopeful PRs. On the other hand short ‘twitpitch‘ messages on Twitter are being hailed as the new way of getting bloggers attention without infuriating them.

Stowe Boyd, who coined the idea term twitpitch, has certainly found it effective for him during his recent visit to Web 2.0 Expo. Together with Brian Solis, they are pushing for the idea of MicroPR, where PR and marketing pitches get more personal.

The trend suggests PR will have to change tack in getting their message out. As Jeremy Toeman observes, “relationships are more important than ever”. Knowing who to target with your message will be key to the success of future PR campaigns.

The astounding drop-off in US newspaper advertising revenues (down 9.4% year on year to $44bn during 2007) can be read three ways. One: the slow down from the credit crunch took hold faster and harder than everyone thought; two: the credit crunch is accelerating the switch out of old, unclickable, untrackable media into new clickable, trackable media; three: this move is being spearheaded by individuals - the classifieds market dropped hardest - down 16.5%, retail only dropped a modest 5%.

Retail is slower to switch because it hasn’t yet totally got to grips with the online model, where customer behaviour, promotions, responses and conversions are tracked and managed online. That will happen increasingly during the coming slowdown.

David Kershaw CEO of M and C Saatchi the advertising agency was interviewed by Greg Wood on BBC’s Today programme this morning and called the state of the advertising industry as follows.

“Clients have not stopped spending money, but of course they are nervous about the impact of the credit crunch on consumer spending. That means they are very keen to see that their money is being spent efficiently and to track ROI. Of course that’s easier to do online.”

He talked about paid search, but he could have mentioned any area of activity where technology allows clicks and consumer behaviour to be tracked.

The second annual Ofcom report into digital communications in the UK highlights the shift to advertising online. To quote it:

That figure is equivalent to: almost half the amount spent on all TV advertising; 83pc of advertising spend on ITV1, Channel 4 and Five; and a quarter of all press advertising.

Still more sensational: Google is scooping 40% of that advertising spend. Given the multiplicity of other advertising channels (consumers do not spend 40% of their time on Google, for instance) that is an astonishing number.

This is a cute parody of how advertising talks to customers, in the form of a “I want a divorce” conversation. To quote Joe Consumer “It really gets to the core of the issue that businesses don’t want to use new technology to have a dialog with their customers, they just want to market to them and lower sales costs.”

Consumer: I’ve changed, and you haven’t. We don’t even hang out in the same places any more. You’re not even listening, are you?

Advertiser: Coupons. You want coupons, right?

Internet World took place in London this week. Jonny Rosemont of Weber Shandwick has posted a nice summary of the key lessons. Here is part of it:

“Digitising is changing the world but it shouldn’t change communications strategies i.e. it is still all about giving people what they want

Consumers have to be co-opted into the marketing process, they are the new brand managers …”

This chimes with some thoughts that have been percolating in my head for a while.

Brands find it harder currently to respond to all their customers and stakeholders in ways that satisfy them.

There are three reasons for this:

a) It is now easier for the consumer to address the brand. Brands can no longer hide behind call centres and complaints procedures. Customers can discover email addresses and when they email they expect a response. When they don’t get that response, or aren’t happy with it, they can make a post on a message board, or post a hostile review, or blog.

b) It is now more difficult for the brand to address the consumer. All of the various “channels” have broken down, eroded, become one. All communications by the brand have become part of one general conversation. The comments of a tired call centre worker, or the carefully judged explanations of a chief executive briefing analysts all represent the “brand”. And they have as much, if not more currency than conventional marketing and advertising messages . It doesn’t necessarily all take place online, but 80% of it is recorded online. Worse, the relationship between the brand’s message and the consumer is mediated by the search engines, and that means that the brand’s message gets mixed up with the comments and statements of all of its other stakeholders, including the disaffected consumers mentioned above.

c) The expectations of both consumer and brand are out of whack. The consumer expects the kind of response he or she might get from the local dry-cleaner (”I’m sorry about that, we’ll clean it again”); the brand expects to be able to choke off the access of the consumer to dialogue (restricting access to call centres by ensuring wait times are long, and concealing emails and phone numbers). Neither is realistic. The consumer will have their response, but this cannot always be a one-to-one experience. The brand will have to communicate with the consumer, but will have to find ways of doing so without setting up a response centre the size of the Inland Revenue’s.

In these circumstances brands can learn much from the lessons of the early community builders online. They need to give some of the work of communicating their brand values and compiling their FAQs to the broader stakeholder group. When we set up the message boards in the early days of BBC online we discovered (copying AOL) that it works better to recruit online moderators (brand advocates and protectors) from amongst the stakeholder group (EastEnders fans, or mums with kids) than it did to use paid employees. The EastEnders or Doctor Who fans cared more about the forum and worked harder at maker it a success than the paid employees.

Similarly a Land Rover aficionado knows more about Land Rover than any product manager working for Land Rover ever will. These are the new brand champions, and the constituency who can do most to create a channel with that vast, mass amorphous group of Internet searchers and (potential) customers who are so hard to reach by conventional means. What a brand needs to do is to figure out how to get their stakeholders to do some of their communications for them, to empower them. What is the good news about the brand? What are its responses to key challenges? Brands can use the tools of social media research to learn how to identify and to speak to its key stakeholders: who are they? what messages do they respond to? what messages do they reject? If they communicate based on that understanding there is a chance that the positive message will spread.

This is an argument which is inspired by customer service, but it applies as well to investor relations, marketing communications and - perhaps most urgently - advertising.

Recent figures from the IAB indicate that UK online advertising has reached £2bn. This number has already outstripped radio and newspapers and is chasing down television (at £3.9bn). The internet’s proportion of ad spend in the UK is the highest in the world.

It is worth a second look at the trends hidden in the figures. The online advertising total was up 42% year on year. Paid search, however, grew at 52% (above the trend). Display ads grew below the trend at 35%. Display ads - which were the dominant form of advertising during the internet bubble - now represent only 22.6% of the total advertising spend.

The reasons are not hard to find: an excellent click-through rate on a display ad is 1%. Most click-through rates are far lower. The web surfers who click on a banner are poorly qualified as prospects. They may become customers, they may not. Even back at the height of the dot-com boom, frustrated ad analysts were writing columns like this - failing to find any way of showing that online advertising had any impact on buying decisions. It is still hard to track the impact of online display advertising and advertisers have found that frustrating.

Compare paid search: here customers have qualified themselves as having an interest in the topic chosen by the advertiser. It is a far more effective way of capturing monetisable online transactions and product searches (58% of the total £1.2bn is now going on paid search). But paid search remains a medium for calls to action, not for branding. It is very hard to give much of a flavour of your brand in the haiku-like format of a Google paid search advertisement. For that you need to find a way to connect emotionally with your audience, to make them feel happy, sad, excited. This remains a huge challenge online.

An upcoming conference organised by our friends at Search Engine Strategies looking at advertising through social networks. Clever approaches here seem much more likely to drive brand value than paid search. If I become the “friend” of Lily Allen, I am clearly qualifying myself much more as a potential buyer of her future output. The same goes for anything entertainment-related. But it is much more of a challenge for brands which are not entertainment related. Social networks pose them exactly the same problems as normal web pages. They either have to post a banner or sponsor an event. They can’t rely on pull, because (as sellers of motor insurance for example) they can’t compete with the Arctic Monkeys. No one on a social network like MySpace will publicly identify themselves with a functional brand - however useful they may find it - in the way they might with a star.

So where do brand builders go? The answer is that they need to identify their own target networks. Every brand has its own universe of key authorities, people who do spend their time talking about motor insurance or pension provision. We have recently been working for the car rental giant Avis Europe alongside our colleagues at UK digital agency Web Liquid. One of the things we helped Avis Europe to do was to identify:

a) who was talking about them and in what terms; b) who was talking about car hire/rental in general; c) the key authorities with whom they needed to connect;

This work identified those who could be thought of as Avis’s own “MySpace” - that is: a community of people who hire cars, talk about car hire and are authoritative on car hire. Our work enabled Avis Europe to identify the key topics that car renters were concerned about, and to help align their product with the needs of that market. We showed them who were the key authoritities in “trustworthy car rental”. Where they sat in that in conversation, and who they needed to impress to be talked about in a more positive way. We identified the key hot topics of those influencers - what language they were using, what their concerns were.

As a consequence of this work, the marketing team at Avis led by Xavier Vallée and Rob White, and the customer service team led by Eibhlin Payne and Stephen Spiers have been doing a lot of product and service development in the background and they have just now begun to talk about that in the form of a blog wetryharder.co.uk. The aim of the blog is to open a dialogue with the marketplace.

This kind of approach sets a benchmark - in our opinion - for what online brand building needs to become: a process of engagement with the online marketplace.

1. You find out what your brand is - by listening to the way it is discussed, by monitoring and measuring those conversations. How important are you? What are your key strengths, your weaknesses? What are your supporters saying? What are your detractors saying?
2. You start acting on the insights, improving the product, becoming if you like more like the best self you can be;
3. You start - very cautiously - to talk about what you are doing, trying to attenuate your voice not to the slogans of the marketing department, but to the words of your consumers;
4. You measure how you are doing. What is the change in sentiment around your product? Are you now preferred to your competitors? On what grounds?

Then you repeat the process. Slowly, and in lock-step with your customers, you build your brand. This process is not just about good market research, or good advertising: it puts both to the service of creating an impregnable place for your brand at the heart of the most valuable place you can be: the place where you solve problems for your customers.

The ad generator is a site that randomly matches commercial slogans and still photos (from Flickr).  It is a poker-faced parody of advertising rhetoric.  It’s the work of Alexis Lloyd.  [via TechCrunch]

The government has rowed back from its commitment to spend £50m over three years educating the young people of Britain about sexual health. There is a quiet epidemic of chlamydia amongst the young people of Britain. The UK has one of the highest infection rates in the world, with over 1% of 16-19 year olds being infected. Untreated chlamydia can cause infertility in young women. This decision not to spend this arbitrary sum on advertising is to be applauded. It is very ill-advised for anyone - let alone a taxpayer-funded government department - to pledge to spend a certain amount on advertising over a certain period of time. Spending money on advertising does not magically equate to changing attitudes or raising awareness. The government should instead commit to a measurement such as raising the awareness of the issue, or the incidence of young people seeking advice and then the outcome can be measured. Announcing that you have a big budget for advertising simply advises the advertising professionals that you have more money than sense.

However the good news on the budget has not been followed by shrewd allocation of the budget for the campaign between the various media.

The word on the grapevine when this campaign was first mooted a year ago (we heard about it via a PR company who asked our advice about getting the message out online) was that this campaign was not planned to involve a significant online spend but was going to be dominated by a TV campaign.

One ad has been released to the press. It shows good-looking teenagers getting off at a club. Their designer clothes are branded “gonorrhoea” or “chlamydia”; the commentary talks about “sexually transmitted diseases” and invites the audience to wear a condom.

The concentration is on TV and the information available seems limited. Stories in the Guardian and the BBC which routinely list useful links can’t find a website to link to and instead link to the Department of Health website, which does not even list the campaign on its front page. The top link today is from social search site Connotea where it featured under the “UK” tag, largely thanks to the medically-minded Connotea user Ojcius.

The PR company we spoke to suggested that the public relations budget was likely to be small, around £50k at the most and mostly directed to advising the press about the TV campaign. They wanted to know what they could do online. We advised that the budget allocation to the internet should be far higher, since it offered an excellent opportunity to reach the target audience with high quality information. Why the internet, they asked? Well, even the government’s own watchdog Ofcom has noticed that young people are watching less TV.

This is what a recent Ofcom survey said:

Television is of declining interest to many 16-24 year olds; on average they watch television for one hour less per day than the average television viewer. … Instead, the internet plays a central role in daily life; more than 70% of 16-24 year old internet users use social networking websites (compared to 41% of all UK internet users) and 37% of 18-24 year olds have contributed to a blog or website message board (compared to 14% of all UK internet users).

The news that the campaign creative (above) was aimed at magazines is particularly contrary, given that recent research has shown Internet use gaining year on year at 17% across Europe and magazine readership falling 7%.

Finally: persuasive research has shown that young people take advice on sex not from the government or the media, but from their friends. They don’t stop having sex or wear condoms just because they are asked to. Surely this was an opportunity for a campaign exploiting the fact that many young adults spend their leisure time not watching TV but talking on Bebo, MySpace or LiveJournal?

We don’t expect government communications experts all to be using sophisticated word-of-mouth measurement tools such as our own, but we do expect them to be a little more clued up about their target demographic. This seems a tremendously old-fashioned campaign. BTW Please contact us if you can find the website for this campaign. Searches on “chlamydia campaign” and even the campaign’s tagline “I’ve got Chlamydia” come up blank.

TV executive Andy Duncan yesterday pointed out that if Google continues to generate the same proportion of its revenue from the UK (it generated a massive 15% here in the first six months of its current financial year) it will net $1.57bn this year alone and will overtake ITV as the single largest recipient of advertising dollars within two years.

These numbers are extraordinary given the slenderness of most brands’ investment in internet marketing and advertising.  Online is still the poor relation of TV in terms of resources.  Teams are small, and budgets are spent on a combination of banners, promotional microsites and paid search in patterns that have changed little since 2001.  Perhaps this is the wake-up call UK corporations have needed to put more of their resources into online.

An excellent survey of “citizen journalism” and the switch of news consumption to being a) continuous b) online by Stephen Quinn of Deakin University, Australia, writing in Ohmynews. The key stats:

• Internet advertising in the United States jumped 38 percent to a record $3.9 billion in the first quarter of this year as more marketers moved to the Web (IaB, PwC);
  
• UK Internet advertising will surpass newspaper advertising in 2006, at 13.3% of total $23bn. (Guardian);
  
• 39 percent of men aged 18-34 surveyed got their news from the Internet compared with 5 percent who read newspapers (Carnegie Foundation)

Two recent U.S. marketing campaigns have used social media to connect with a mass audience. First came Philips Norelco Bodygroom with their shaveeverywhere.com campaign. This jokey video as well as being hosted on its own domain was posted at youtube.com and at heavy.com and has allegedly been downloaded one billion times.

Now Gillette have launched a campaign, which parodies an online grassroots campaign in format. According to Advertising Age: “The Noscruf campaign includes paid search ads on Google and other search engines, promotional placement on Heavy.com and a posting on YouTube.com for two viral videos from a fictional advocacy group - National Organization of Social Crusaders Repulsed by Unshaven Faces - and its Web site, Noscruf.org.”

In this case the campaigners are women who want their menfolk to shave and have created the noscruf website as part of their campaign. The site (above) is being visited 60m times a day, say Ad Age, citing Alexa. It is the work of Digitas, a Boston-based agency.

What is intriguing about both of these campaigns is that:

1) they are online in inspiration and execution; 2) the off-line element is limited to PR - the Bodygroom campaign benefited from a plug on Howard Stern’s syndicated radio show; 3) they make use of existing places of debate and traffic - youtube.com and heavy.com and have not depended solely on destination urls.

Imaginative pieces of buzz marketing, both.

The Celebrity babies blog, which is stuffed full of product endorsements and useful baby-type links, carries contextual ads provided by Vibrant Media, where a link is double-underlined and the ad pops up in a reasonably friendly way. It doesn’t interrupt the user experience and seems a good compromise aimed at making blogging into a sustainable business.

Oops. I go to the Guinness blog this morning to check how it is doing and take a screenshot for a presentation, and the landing page is there, but clicking on it gives you a 404 error.

Looking at that landing page again I worry about how many users are going to get beyond this page (technical failures aside). It would be friendlier to offer some kind of content upfront perhaps short extracts from the Guinness book of records or other Guinness-owned collateral. Then you could ask site users to accept the Terms and Conditions of the site to go further (including age stipulations) and activate your cookie to make sure they never saw the page again.

Robert Scoble is suggesting that obscure bloggers might consider linking to the word “brrreeeport”.

The idea is that enough people link they they will build their authority courtesy of Scoble. Of course this only really works if someone else manages to interpose their take on the “brrreeeport” phenomenon and gain relevant authority. (And that’s real authority, not the Technorati sort) And that authority is only valuable in the context of someone searching on the word “brrreeeport”. My interest in this is that it is a text book demonstration, using humans, of what black hat influence brokers are constantly doing with spam blogs/splogs.

But there is an upside. Say if you are a marketer, with a message that you are blogging about. You encourage bloggers to use your message in a link using a particular keyword, and you reward the most imaginative of them with a frontpage link. We were talking to a publisher this morning and this would be super-relevant to them. Each time an author’s name or book title was mentioned in an amusing way the publisher could highlight the link, and share some of the brand’s authority with that blogger. A cool viral campaign.

[Incidentally - I came across this post as a result of a mail from my old friend from Amazon - Dave Mutton - who has launched a cool site called Blogcode . The idea of it is to find blogs similar to mine - kind of opt-in collaborative searching for blogs. Neat idea.]

Google has reported that the UK population as a whole now spends more time online than they do watching TV. This is an epochal change for marketers. It means that they must finally get to grips with a medium (the internet) that has remained largely resistant to their wiles.

Think of an online marketing campaign that has impressed you. I bet you that you can’t. Think of the online products that you use and value: iTunes, Amazon.com, Skype, Google. I would bet that you did not find these products as a result of a marketing message. Someone recommended them to you. You may have followed a link on a web page. And if you did I bet that link was contextual. It was not an advertisement.

Old school advertising is good for awareness, but it has not been a major part of the success of internet-era marketing. Internet era marketing is about testimonials, about peer recommendations, about serendipity: stumbling across something interesting whilst looking for something else.

It is no surprise that the way to internet marketing success has been shown by paid search. Paid search has the huge advantage of being contextual. Advertisers choose when to give you their message. They give you their message only when they think you are likely to transact. They are only going to communicate to you if they feel their communication is welcome.

But there are other products waiting in the wings behind paid search. These products, too, will depend on marketers opening a conversation only when they know that a consumer is responsive. It is one reason internet marketers are using our products at Market Sentinel. They want to find out what is being said online in ongoing conversations, conversations that are (or could be) relevant to their product. And then they want to join in with those conversations.

And that joining in process is one of the hardest things to pull off. Years ago, when I was at the BBC, I was one of those responsible (with my current colleague Sheila Sang) for launching the BBC’s message boards. It was an invaluable opportunity to learn about how communities worked. One thing I learnt good and early is that if an outsider comes into a community with an irrelevant marketing message, they will be shunned. It is as if an insurance salesman were to wander into a snug bar and suddenly pitch into a sales spiel in front of eight surprised drinkers. Such a conversation only works if it is relevant. If someone is discussing where to go skiing, and you happen to mention that you know a good place, they will be keen to listen, particularly if you seem to be impartial.

That is why we work with our customers to identify where the appropriate conversations are taking place online, and to identify the authorities. That is the beginning of understanding where a conversation can begin. Is there a strategy for beginning a conversation that always work? No. Conversations of this kind are like pick-up lines, nothing quite works twice. But honesty helps: “Hi I know you like my product because I noticed you talking about it. I am keen to hear your reaction to some new features I am planning to introduce.” This is the strategy that Intuit used to get their QuickBooks blogging strategy underway.

You might call it contextual marketing, and, as a science, it’s in its infancy. We are taking baby steps to figure out how it should work. As ever in this new world of marketing communications, it is going to be all about permission, about honesty and about relevance.

The NMA this week quotes some interesting case studies about how brands have been experimenting with blog-based marketing in the US.

Levi’s, Nokia, Audi and Budget Car Rentals all ran campaigns on blogs last year, of which Budget’s was probably the most fun, rejuvenating the slightly tired format of the online treasure hunt by posting daily video clues on a blog, linked to stickers placed around US cities (nudged on by a tempting prize of $160,000). Budget sensibly hired BL Ochman to create the campaign, which was run exclusively through bloggers and blogs.

Blogvertising looks like it can offer significant value to brands - if they get it right. Budget’s low-cost campaign drove 20,000 unique visitors an hour to their blog, with several thousand registering to play. The campaign was also in the upper quartile in terms of click-throughs. Audi used just 0.5% of its advertising budget on blog ads, which drove 29% of traffic to its site.

With advertising on bulletin boards and chat rooms generally spurned, it may be hard for marketers and advertisers to get their heads around just how different blogs can be. Every decent branding book worth its salt is clearly tells businesses to stop pushing their messages out and to start pulling their consumers in. Blogging is going to play a huge role in this. As ever, the trick will be getting it right - a challenge for the innovators, but tough in an industry that’s long had the monopoly of owning the message.

A survey by the researchers at the R. L. Polk Center for Automotive studies in the US has found that first time buyers are shunning traditional media in favour of the internet.

When asked what media they relied on as providing the most important information in making a purchasing decision the respondents lined up thus:

The Internet 35% TV 8.5% Magazines 4.4% Newspapers 3.6% Radio 1.1%

To quote the press release: “First-time buyers’ dependence on Web-based media validates the need for an aggressive interactive strategy to court them on the manufacturer and retail level,” said Lonnie Miller, managing director for the Polk Center for Automotive Studies. “The Internet’s relevance in the 18-30 year age group has reached critical mass and is completely reconfiguring how car companies need to reach out to first-time buyers.”

This finding makes the wisdom of the decision by GM to reach out to buyers via blogs seem far-sighted. [via Basturea]

As the riots continue across France, the UMP party of prime minister interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy has created a stir by purchasing keywords like “riots” and “violence” on Google AdWords, and placing a political advertisement there. The ad is at the top of the paid search and leads to an _AcgBAQ&num=1&q=http://www.u-m-p.org/site/soutien.php”>online petition in support of M. Sarkozy, who is a candidate for the French presidency. Controversy has surrounded the fact that one of the words the agency has purchased is “racaille” - or scum - the contemptuous term Sarkozy used of the rioters.

The campaign is the work of French agency L’enchanteur des nouveaux médias. It will set a powerful precedent.