Ads As Media

These rules apply to any advertiser creating media, whether it's articles, blog posts, or video blog entries. But I'll write it to apply to responsible article creation for Adam, my WebSourced colleague. Yeah, he's my buddy too.

For the advertiser seeking to create articles the rules are fairly simple. It may help if you think of your current clients, and potential clients, as your audience. I will refer to clients as audience for the rest of this post.

Know Your Audience
In particular, know what issues plague your clients from day to day. If you sell pizza ovens (hey Fash!) then consider who's buying your ovens. These are people who run kitchens.

Knowing this you know that they also manage employees and money. They also face market pressures such as low carb. They also have to clean their ovens, which is tough in itself.

All of these issues that the pizza joint manager faces would make great articles. Here's a list of titles that this little brainstorm suggested to me:

How to Motivate Your Employees to Upsell Pizza Sizes
When Success Hinders Growth: Making Time To Expand Your Pizza Joint
Getting Expansion Loans for Your Pizza Business
How One Pizza Joint Rode the Low Carb Craze and Prospered
How to Make Your Pizza Ovens Sparkle Like New
10 Tips for Cleaning Burnt Cheese Off Pizza Pans Faster Than Ever Before
15 Crazy New Gourmet Pizza Recipes

Understanding your audience's buying cycle can also help you in creating content.

Know Your Strengths
As a pizza oven seller online you might not know much about upselling from a medium pizza to a large. But you do - I promise - have some lodes of information that can apply to the pizza business. Hunting out where your experience and expertise converges with the pizza oven business is a matter of:

a) knowing your personal strengths
b) having conversations with your customers

Conversations with your customers will reveal many many ideas for more articles/blog posts/tools (yes tools - especially web based - are some of the strongest forms of new media... so watch for tools your audience might need.)

Develop a series of questions that will uncover the vacancies in your audience's current media. WHAT?? I mean uncover what questions your audience/potential audience has and create media (write articles/blog posts/video blog entries) that answer these questions.

So What's A Responsible Article?
A responsible article is one that focuses soley, completely and entirely on solving a particular problem your audience faces. This article, while intended to influence the audience by suggesting behaviors or strategies that might help them, does not seek to influence the audience in a way that will benefit the company.

An irresponsible article is one that is intended to sway the audience into an action that primarily benefits the advertiser.

So How Does this Benefit My Bottom Line?
If you're writing responsible articles (creating responsible media... remember this applies to all advertiser created media) that aren't intended to sway the audience into buying your products then what the hell are you doing writing articles?

You're proving, through your free sharing of valuable information, that:

a) you're trustworthy
b) you're a thought leader/expert

So how does being found a trustworthy thought leader affect your bottom line? Let's think about that for a second... from the SEO industry perspective.

(for a list of article directories and more of the nuts and bolts of publishing articles online check out Article Marketing)

One thing Google and other search engines have done is to provide advertisers, that is, companies seeking to entertain/inform their client/audience, with a medium for the dissemination of their own media. The current media of choice are the blog and the article.

I come from an article publishing background where it's common for businesses to create articles and publish them to ezine and website audiences seeking information or advice.

I have a separate blog that focuses solely on this practice: the Article Marketing blog. (actually right now it's focused on article directories and submitting them to take advantage of the fact that these directories provide back links to the advertiser's site, thus increasing their standings in the search engines).

Advertiser articles and blogs are challenging, because again there may be a conflict of interest between the advertiser and the audience... the advertiser may not reveal the whole truth in the interest of protecting a resource avenue. It's my belief that the true value of a company is not in the product but the thought behind their process, their integrity, and their desire to truly provide value to their client/audience.

When will a company create a feature film? Product placements are common as commercials. Soon I think we'll (perhaps) see movie studios run by the companies themselves. We'll certainly see companies taking advantage of the meMedia video blogging networks that sprout up. Because meMedia is about companies too (look at the number of company/CEO bloggers out there).

So perhaps before big budget hollywood advertiser-run studios we'll see the low budget creation of video blog productions.

The companies that come to think of their clients as an audience and provide them with the media/information they're looking for will come to capture wider and wider audience/client share, and they will learn more quickly what it is their customers are looking for because of increased interaction.

With the emergence of ads as media comes an increasing responsibility for the advertisers to be truthful. This means being academic and truthfull in all the information created. As we hope the news would be.

We know the news isn't always trustworthy though, so one trend to watch for as ads as media begin to encroach on dominant forms of media is an increasing skepticism. And an increasing trust in companies that are very forthright about how they gather data and organize it.

Many I'm sure will argue that the advertisers have too much interest in making money to provide reliable or trustworthy information. I think the increasing pressures of meMedia though will ensure, in part, more honesty from advertisers who choose to begin creating their own media offerings.

Ads as media tracks the convergence of advertisers and media. Some early examples include the infomercial. More recent examples include stuff like queer eye for the straight guy and america's next top model, both of which were essentially product placement vehicles, though admittedly compelling in a sort of car wreck horrible can't stop looking kind of way.

The place where I watch this convergence closely is online. That's where there's a HUGE opportunity for advertisers to become responsible media providers.

How is this happening?

One way is through conferences. My company, WebSourced, recently put on a search conference. This is an example of an industry player constructing a media event (media here defined as a means/medium of transferring information).

Another common method of ads as media includes the company-created email newsletter. The industry I'm most familiar with, search engine optimization, has many sources of company created info sources.

Jill Whalen, an early seo provider, created not only a newsletter but a forum where those who wish to learn about seo can ask questions and share ideas that she thinks are right.

Andy Beal created the SearchEngineLowdown as a means of both providing a mostly responsible, if moderatel biased, look on the SE industry and a vehicle for spreading the name of his company, WebSourced, or as I first knew the company, KeywordRanking.

Where else do we see ads as media? What ideas do you have regarding the convergence of advertising and media?