True Blood Viral Marketing Site BloodCopy + Gawker = Controversy
June/04/09 15:08 Filed in: Promotion
BloodCopy - One of the original Tru(e) Blood viral marketing sites, that wound down last fall, recently came back to un-life with new content in promotion of season 2. Among the promotional efforts was a cross-site promotion where posts from BloodCopy would appear on blog site “Gawker”:
/ 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.” /
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/05/gawker-vp-says-sponsored-posts-will-bring-in-majority-of-revenue-one-day/
It seems that some individuals complained of the blurring between blogging and advertisements but, more curiously, some outlets actually took the BloodCopy posts as real news!
/ "Gawker the editorial staff and Gawker the advertising staff don't tell each other much about what they're doing," Snyder explained. "The way the media economic engine works is that the eyeballs attracted by editorial can be sold by advertising in order to pay for the editorial. It's a nice little symbiotic circle, but the key ingredient for keeping it running is to keep a bright line between the ads and edit. And clearly that wasn't the case here."
"[We have] been taken to the media criticism woodshed over this one," he continued. "What's advertising should be called advertising and what's edit should be called edit. It hurts both to blur the distinction." The "announcement" was since taken down, although some websites have kept archive copies.
Gawker's vice president for sales and marketing, Chris Batty, respected the opinions regarding the tie-up, but reiterated that they have done this before--in their early years, he mentioned, they had tie-ups with Nike and New Line to promote their products through clearly-marked blog entries, which he believes would have a bigger impact than traditional ads. "A lot of time has passed and a lot of people who write for us don't remember how we used to pay the bills here," he said. He's surprised, however, that more people "took this at face value." /
http://www.buddytv.com/articles/true-blood/true-blood-its-backfire-at-the-29046.aspx
/ 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.” /
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/05/gawker-vp-says-sponsored-posts-will-bring-in-majority-of-revenue-one-day/
It seems that some individuals complained of the blurring between blogging and advertisements but, more curiously, some outlets actually took the BloodCopy posts as real news!
/ "Gawker the editorial staff and Gawker the advertising staff don't tell each other much about what they're doing," Snyder explained. "The way the media economic engine works is that the eyeballs attracted by editorial can be sold by advertising in order to pay for the editorial. It's a nice little symbiotic circle, but the key ingredient for keeping it running is to keep a bright line between the ads and edit. And clearly that wasn't the case here."
"[We have] been taken to the media criticism woodshed over this one," he continued. "What's advertising should be called advertising and what's edit should be called edit. It hurts both to blur the distinction." The "announcement" was since taken down, although some websites have kept archive copies.
Gawker's vice president for sales and marketing, Chris Batty, respected the opinions regarding the tie-up, but reiterated that they have done this before--in their early years, he mentioned, they had tie-ups with Nike and New Line to promote their products through clearly-marked blog entries, which he believes would have a bigger impact than traditional ads. "A lot of time has passed and a lot of people who write for us don't remember how we used to pay the bills here," he said. He's surprised, however, that more people "took this at face value." /
http://www.buddytv.com/articles/true-blood/true-blood-its-backfire-at-the-29046.aspx
