Cravendale are currently running some new adverts to promote their milk and website milkmatters.co.uk.

The ads are the brainchild of Wieden & Kennedy, an advertising with seven offices worldwide, one of those being based in London.

The current campaign kicked off in February with ‘Bad Bull’.

My current favourite is this, ‘Toe Tapping’:

I love the look of these ads and the random sounds that make up it’s dialogue. It almost reminds me of the Terry Gilliam Monty Python style of animation.

It’s been a while since I really enjoyed an advertising campaign, but this really makes me laugh. For all the money that is thrown on over the top, grandiose adverts which make me totally non-plussed, it is these low budget looking 30 second works of art that actually make me want to watch. Genius.

On Sunday, Lolly published a post on Blog Till You Drop Should bloggers get paid to write blog posts? where she shared how she’d been approached and asked to write about something in exchange for payment.

Lolly said:

An agency recently offered me €70 to write about their latest social media campaign; this made feel somewhat uncomfortable as I don’t think that bloggers should be paid to write about brands/products and I think this is a worrying trend…

This is a matter that I feel very strongly about, and I think that my comment on the post reflected that.

I’d like to go through my thoughts on this as simply as possible…

It makes your client look stupid

By asking a blogger to write about your client in exchange for payment, you are calling in to question the quality of whatever it is your PRing. If your client’s product isn’t very good, you should let them know that, and work with them to create some great content that will get people talking around the product. It also calls into question your client’s judgement – why would they choose you to do PR if what you’re executing is an advertising campaign?

What do you do if they write negatively?

If you offer to pay a blogger to write about your client, and they do so negatively, will you still pay the blogger? Probably not. This will annoy the blogger and give them plenty of reason to call you out, and deservedly so. What’s more, i’d bet that you didn’t ask them to disclose that you got in touch and asked them to write about your client in the first place.

It’s setting a dangerous precedent

Once you’ve paid one blogger, word will spread and other bloggers will expect you to pay them to write about your client. This is unsustainable as a PR plan because it eats up a lot of budget that could be better used to, for example, create some cool content. It also raises the question of who do you pay, and how much? Why should one blogger get paid more than another?

Paying bloggers to write about your client is fraudulent and unethical

By throwing money at a blogger, you are asking them to publish a post they might otherwise not have in exchange for a rare commodity. This is essentially bribery. If you don’t give the blogger the opportunity to test out your client’s offering and simply ask them to write a positive blog post, you are questioning their integrity, asking them to lie to their audience and risking their credibility. You are lying to your client because this isn’t coverage you have worked hard to sell in, it’s coverage you’ve paid for and is in effect, advertising. If this is what your agency does, why not advise that the client just does a load of banner advertising?

Yes, bloggers should be given a reason to write about your client
Bloggers are seeing the fruits of their labour, writing mountains of content may well see you build up a reputation that then gets you pitches from PR agencies. PR agencies will want to find ways of getting a blogger to write about whatever it is they’re working on, be it by sending out product for review, an invitation to an event or offering exclusive content. That is great, why not make being a blogger a little bit fun?

Bloggers should be incentivised, but bloggers should also be aware that sometimes a client’s budget is so small that they cannot afford to always offer great stuff and content really is the only thing they can offer.

I found myself in a situation recently when I got in touch with a blogger to offer them a story where they refused to even think about my client despite them being highly relevant, because they weren’t offering them anything tangible alongside the story – this is a direct result of the sort of unethical behaviour I have just outlined.

PRs are making a rod for their own backs, whereas bloggers are doing exactly the same. We will find ourselves coming to a point where bloggers will only accept pitches in exchange for cash, and PRs will only be able to pitch because they can offer cash. At that point we will have found ourselves in a state of advertorial and the entire ecosystem will collapse.

That may appear a little melodramatic, but it is a fear I hold.

I do not want to be in a position as a PR where I must ask my client to stump up some cash as a reward for a blogger who will falsely write about how much they love xxx product.

I do not want to be in a position as a blogger where I do not get any pitches because a poor PR thinks I won’t write about something because i’ll only accept payment, despite it being relevant.

We must put a stop to this sort of practice now before we get an FTC equivalent barging their way in to the blogosphere dictating how we must behave and holding us accountable. We should be holding ourselves accountable. Anything less in unacceptable.

Laurence Borel published Should bloggers get paid to write blog posts? this morning, and it set me off on a bit of a rant, which you can read in the comments section.

I urge you to read Lolly’s post in full and leave your thoughts on the matter – I am not going to re-post my comment here as I think this is an issue you need to make your own mind up on before reading what I have to say on the matter.

Here’s my weekly round up of blog posts and articles i’ve shared on Twitter in the last 7 days…

Transformative Vs Incremental Change
Phil Gomes, SVP, Digital Media, Edelman Digital
Shel Israel warns PR professionals they must change with the times
Community relations and influencer engagement
His Facebook Status Now? ‘Charges Dropped’
Entrepreneurs: The New Celebrities
Discipline and the Bloggers Opportunity
Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel
Comment: The problem with PR email
Why everybody should be grateful for five years of Firefox
New microsyntax for Twitter: three pointers and the slasher

Tumblr have revealed some stats that tell us a lot about their growth and how the service is used, taken from Techcrunch:

20 million unique vistors in October
420 million impressions in total
2 million Tumblr bloggers
40 million new posts per month
10,000 new users each day
85% of users are continually active after sign up
35% use Tumblr on Facebook
30% of Tumblr’s users have downloaded the bookmarklet
15% downloads the company’s iPhone application

And all this with just 10 full time employees.

I’ve had a play with Google Ad Planner to try and get some UK specific numbers, so here they are:

Unique visitors (estimated cookies) 840K
Unique visitors (users) 390 K
Reach 0.9%
Page views 13 M
Total visits 1.8 M
Avg visits per visitor 4.6
Avg time on site 9:50
64% of it’s users are male (36% female)

Age:
0-17 8%
18-24 27%
25-34 32%
35-44 16%
45-54 11%
55-64 4%
65+ 2%

Do you use Tumblr? What do you think of it?

WordPress is getting in on the location game, reported Mashable yesterday.

Mashable says that “[WordPress.com] bloggers that host their sites on WordPress.com automatically attach their location to individual blog posts. Doing so will also make your post searchable by location, so other users can find blog posts from specific places.”

Jane Wells wrote on the WordPress blog:

“Starting today, when you log in to write a post, you have the option of identifying your location. For browsers that support it, we can get this information automatically through the magic of 21st century technology and you just have to double-check to make sure the location is correct. You can also enter your location manually. This feature is opt-in, meaning that if you don’t want anyone to know where you were when you wrote a post, that’s okay.”

The ability to search for posts by location is being held off until more data has been accrued.

To enable geotagging, “you must first activate the feature in your profile. Go to your blog’s admin and click “Users” → “Your Profile” from the admin menu.

Once you see the map, there are several ways of inputing your location.

* Type an address in the “Enter address” box, then click the “Find Address” button.
* Click the map at the location you want.
* Click the “Auto Detect” button.

The Auto Detect feature attempts to figure out where your computer is automatically. If your computer has a GPS device built in (many mobile phones do, for example), it will use that to determine your location. Some browsers also support the W3C Geolocation API and/or the Google Gears Geolocation API. If your browser supports one of those APIs, the API will be used to determine a best guess for your location. If all else fails, WordPress.com will try to guess your location from your computer’s IP address.”

Under “My Location”, click the checkbox to “Enable Geotagging”.”

I think the ability to geotag content is a great step forward for bloggers – it will help to build communities and introduce new people into conversations they may otherwise have missed.

I have turned this feature on, so soon you’ll be able to find me as a London Blogger in Kilburn!

Crowd Sourcing via Twitter has been made easier through the Introduction of Twitter Lists in the last few weeks. So much so that Irish Digital PR agency Simply Zesty are “using crowdsourcing to create county lists of Twitter users”.

The press release says:

“The company have set a limit of 72 hours per country, to gather as many users as possible. The idea is to create lists by area that anyone can use and also to produce a map showing which areas are the most active on Twitter. The experiment started in Ireland on Tuesday morning and in under than 24 hours they had spread it to the UK and America, due to the high demand.”

Nice.

On the Simply Zesty blog, Lauren Fisher said:

We want to put new Twitter lists to great use by creating lists of every single person using Twitter in Ireland. We want to do using twitter itself and we want to use the power of crowd sourcing to do it. All you have to do is tweet the message below and we will collect all the tweets and add them to the lists for each county. We will then publish the results and have a full twitter list of users for each of the 32 counties as an incredible public list for the Irish public to use.

Now this ties in to where I think Twitter lists will be at their most useful – as a resource. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t thihnk that creating a “top techies” list is particularly helpful, and of course could backfire spectacularly if you omit someone. However, if you’re creating a resource that is say, all the folk who work for xxx, then lists become incredibly powerful.

It’s an interesting project Lauren and her gang are running and I look forward to seeing the outcome.