Gawker VP says sponsored posts will bring in majority of revenue one day
Expect Gawker Media’s latest advertising innovation to draw criticism, if not blood, when it sees daylight today. The blogging empire is temporarily welcoming a new site into its fold that’s written and paid for by HBO to promote the network’s noir vampire drama, True Blood. And the word “advertisement” won’t appear anywhere in the project’s vicinity.
Entries from the blog, BloodCopy, will appear as cross-posts in the mix of Gawker Media’s eight verticals, which include Gizmodo, Kotaku, and the flagship. They’ll be set off by a border and labeled as BloodCopy posts but otherwise indistinguishable from editorial content — except that the blog is written by an undead, bloodsucking ghoul.
“With vampires, we thought we could be a little looser with the disclosure and create some disbelief,” Chris Batty, Gawker’s vice president of sales and marketing, told me yesterday, dismissing critics of the advertorial as “humorless.” He also made a bold prediction that surprised me so much I made sure to confirm I’d heard correctly: “If we’re around in three or four years,” Batty said, “the majority of our advertising revenue will be in sponsored posts like this.”
Now, I’ll let others hash out the very-legitimate ethical questions this all raises. Gawker managing editor Gabriel Snyder, echoing a 2007 incident, has already denounced the ad sale: “What’s advertising should be called advertising and what’s edit should be called edit. It hurts both to blur the distinction.” But that’s an easy angle compared to what’s also going on here, which is the fruition of a long-held belief that advertising should act more like content.
“We’d like people to look at what we’re doing with HBO and see that it’s possible for advertising to tell a story,” Batty said, telling me a story of sorts. “True Blood is a narrative, so its campaign should be a narrative, and blogs are the best forum for that, we think.” He also threw around terms like “in-narrative exercise” and “marketing paradigm,” but the upshot is that it makes much more sense for advertisers to deliver messages where readers expect to receive them — within a site’s stream of content — rather than shoved to the side in a display ad.
A good example is this Lifehacker post, written and paid for by paper-shredding purveyor Fellowes, which ran as part of a series in March. In that instance, as you can see below, the content was labeled both “advertisement” and “sponsored post.”
Batty compared the HBO campaign, which starts today at noon, to custom publishing in the magazine industry. “We’ve got rack space, basically, to sell across the Gawker titles,” he said. That was a familiar comparison: Gawker chief Nick Denton has often likened his company’s advertising to glossy spreads in high-end magazines. (Denton, incidentally, passed along my request for an interview to Batty.)
BloodCopy will live amid the Gawker Media family for three weeks, until the premiere of True Blood’s second season. The campaign “costs a lot more” than Gawker’s already-expensive site takeovers, Batty said. We’ll see whether there’s also any cost to Gawker’s editorial integrity.
I have to say I get a little bit happy inside when I read stories like this. It feels like market validation for us, since we focus on automating the advertorial/sponsored content for companies. The glossy custom integrations like this campaign are great (assuming they’re transparent and disclosed as sponsored content), but they typically aren’t available as an “everybrand” solution. Meaning, not every company has the budget or the creativity to pull this off, and there’s limited shelf space to do a fully integrated campaign for everyone. And, while they may have made more money from this than a standard ad campaign, it’s almost a one-off. Scalability is still the demon to conquer.
One of the things I’ve noticed is that blogs are doing a better job than traditional news publishers in realizing that their influence is worth more than just the pixelspace. News publishers actually consider banners to be a valuable part of the “color” of the page layout, which is a fairly print-centric view. Search engines learned long ago that presenting information as a “feed” with only minor variations in presentation layer of items, increases consumption of the total page information. Maybe news should take note?
I don’t think we’re done yet with experiments that test user interest against maximum monetization. But I do agree that transparency is key – users do NOT like to feel foolish, and I think I’d feel like an idiot if I reported to my friends that advertorial information was fact. ‘Course, I’d probably not report vampire stories as fact, so maybe this situation gets a pass.
Dana Todd, CMO
Newsforce Network
Looks like these executions are not being disclosed as sponsored content and the edit team doesn’t look too happy about it. Seem the clarifications note above the sponsored post on the Gawker.com homepage.
Interesting, Dana, and you’re right about scalability. Batty said, “It’s a fairly labor and capital intensive program,” and therefore, “the bar for success is going to be higher.” Thanks for pointing out your company. —Zach
This is far more effective than “True Blood” extra content posted on HBO’s channel.
For a show that already has cult follow that will build, it makes sense.
Future of advertising? Tell me, how do you use it to sell an Oreck Vacuum Cleaner? It is a part of the equation, perhaps?
Too, I would commend both the article editor and previous commentators. Simply good reportage & response.
Thank you,
John Evan Frook
Sticks_hick
True Blood.
Vampires.
Anyone else find it interesting that Gawker’s VP of Sales and Marketing is
Chris Batty?
Gawker’s editorial credibility?
Was that INTENDED as a joke?
Great point re vacuum cleaners, John. I’m sure a creative copywriter could devise a narrative for Oreck, yet it still wouldn’t fit into the content of a site like Gawker. But what about a homemaking blog or something? There’s probably somewhere it would work, like the paper-shredding ad on Gawker Media’s Lifehacker.
Keith, the aptness of Batty’s name had not occurred to me, but as I was obviously intent on making a vampire pun, I wish I’d thought of it!
And, Rory, your skepticism has good company. —Zach
Wonder if that violate the new FTC rules on blogs and paid content?
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2009/tc20090518_532031.htm
It’s a fair question, Carrie. I don’t think this particular campaign is at risk of violating the FTC regulations, but it’s worth keeping in mind. Another good piece on the topic that I just saw: http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=136852
Excellent article. Thanks, Zachary.