[0]

With a title meant to titilate AdWeek asks: Blogs: Fad or Marketing Medium of the Future? We haven’t done a decent fisking on this blog for a while so here it goes:

In the past few years, blogs have gone from a quirky vehicle for expression to a political force to, now, a quirky marketing tool for corporate America.

Quirky, indeed. How about more human and personal, free of advertising copy (so far) and marketing shill?

This year, Nike, Dr Pepper, Mazda, SBC and others have staked claims in the blogosphere. They’ve found blogging (short for “Web-logging") an easy, cheap way to appear hipper and keep customers engaged with the brand.

You go, you hip ad agencies! Engage the customer with the brand! That’s the way to go! Screw conversation and all that cheap ordinary, dull, non-creative, unhip (gasp!) human voice!

“It’s a relatively small investment and can elicit a lot of information because it’s such a democratic medium,” said Matthew Cross, brand consultant at Interbrand, New York. “Compared to the millions companies spend to create or revitalize a brand, and then do TV spots and a print campaign, it’s pennies to the dollar to do a blog.”

Democratic medium(!), my foot, what they see is just another channel that will deliver to us, the consumers “tied to our chairs, head back, eating ‘content’ and crapping cash”. In any case, revitalising brand, TV spots, print campaigns are just so 90s, dahling.

And then, there are the obligatory mentions of Microsoft blogs and Sun’s COO Jonathan Schwartz blogging…

Sun Microsystems is also leading the blogolution. Many of the top dogs at Sun are blog auteurs. Even president/COO Jonathan Schwartz contributes.

Contributes? More like has his own blog. And blogolution and blog auteurs? Give me a break.

Finally, a safety warning:

But there’s a downside to blogging. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, found that out when he made a sarcastic comment on his blog about how “brilliant” it was to air the playoffs opposite election coverage.

Mazda also got spooked by a “HalloweenM3” blog, which was ostensibly created by a twentysomething but seemed to be a way to shill Mazda TV spots. The site disappeared and Mazda reps could not be reached. J. Walter Thompson, San Francisco, handles.

Exactly, so don’t do fake blogs, you naughty AdChildren, but do try this at home, instead of at your hip, iPod-esque offices…

But this quote is spot on:

“If you do anything wrong in the blogosphere, you are in deep doo-doo very quickly,” said Michael Tchong, consumer analyst at Iconoculture, Minneapolis.

Yeah, it’s that kind of a day. It’s probably because I have been catching up with the whole Lovemarks-Cluetrain Deathmatch earlier today, which reminded me of the rubbish spewed at us by the industry for decades.

via Steve Rubel