As an interactive evangelist you have to get tough with advertisers who send you lousy ad copy. In interactive media there is no place to hide when an ad does not perform. If an ad tanks on your blog, or website the advertiser will more often blame your media than their message.
B.L. Ochman, publisher of What's Next Blog, was faced with this situation and posts about the tough love she dished out to NBC who submitted poor ad creative for her blog:
"Dear NBC - Please don't get me wrong: I love you for advertising on my blog. But I want you to get results so you'll keep coming back, and this ad sucks...
So I'd like to give you a little free advice about how to make your blog advertising more effective.
- The job of a blog ad is not to tell your story. Blog ads need to be intriguing, interesting or entertaining enough to get us to a convincing landing page where you have lots of room to tell us what you've got for us.- Talk about us, not about you. Don't take this personally, but we don't care about you. All we care about is what you can do for us.
- What's the ROI? Tell us about what advertisers got in the last Olympics. All advertisers care about is ROI, either in orders or awareness. Give us stats. We don't care how many days are left before your Olympic coverage starts. We want you to tell us, in the headline, why we should care.
- Be topical, timely, edgy, and fun. Blog readers are inured to traditional advertising. They're here, and on other top blogs, looking for something new and interesting.
- Be clear! You want to get brands to advertise on NBC during the Olympics. Tell me in the headline why I should bring my clients to you
- Don't make your ad a black hole. When that dreadful flashing stops in the ad, you're left with what is basically a black hole.
- White space is your friend in blog ads. You're competing with lots of copy that my readers came here - by choice - to get. What you have is basically a blob of copy, and since it's not easy to read at a glance, it's pretty much invisible. Less is more in blog ads.
- Don't scream in blog ads. You need to be clever.- Have a sense of humor.
- Don't be boring.
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