Up, Up and Away! Just over two years ago, a few bloggers talked over coffee about the prospect of blog advertising. It was 2006 and while the blogging phenomenon in Asia had already picked up, advertising on blogs was still abysmal.
Among those at the coffee session were some top Malaysian bloggers, an ambitious entrepreneur named Ming and myself. The subject of the day: How could we build a strong blog advertising network that could develop the then non-existent blog advertising industry? We narrowed down a few things. For one, many blogs ran different “statcounters” to track the traffic of each individual blog; so one blog may get 15,000 page views a month, another may get 20,000 but if they’re both measured by different sources, how do we make sense of it? Then there was the long tail of blogs. Sure, there are some top choices – Kennysia.com, Jeffooi.com, Cheeserland.com and Kyspeaks.com to name a few but the masses are in the hundreds of thousands of blogs out there that may individually have lower traffic, but collectively make up the bulk of the blog readership in our country.
The solution to these problems and more was a blog advertising network with technologies to standardise traffic measurement and creative sizes, and to allow for ad campaigns to be run easily on thousands of blogs.
Towards that vision, Ming and I started Nuffnang.
Nuffnang kicked off in 2007 with a humble team of four. Using only its own medium to market itself to bloggers, in three weeks the network grew to comprise 300 bloggers. (Today Nuffnang has grown to over 50,000 bloggers with offices in Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Manila). With our relatively small network of bloggers, we tried to sell the inventory we had. The initial response was not encouraging. Questions like “What are blogs?” were commonplace, and we soon realised that education about blogs and their influence would turn out to be an integral part of our mission. It was a mixture of good timing and relationship building that got us our first break. Nike (always the frontrunner) came on as one of our very first brands just three months after Nuffnang started. The rest of the herd soon followed and the noise they made created more attention for us. The appeal about running banner ads on blogs is that you get to see how people interact with your ads on these blogs. And it’s not just by looking at click-through ratios or interaction rates, but also at what bloggers write. Often when we run pure banner ad campaigns, bloggers who notice the ad begin writing and via the blog entries and comments, you can gauge the average consumer’s affinity to your brand because that’s what bloggers are, after all: consumers. Soon enough the very same planners that gave us our first opportunities started asking, “What’s next on blog advertising beyond just banner ad campaigns?” So we started including other elements of blogging into ad campaigns. Advertorial write-ups and blogger contests that incentivised bloggers to write about a particular brand were a big hit, with successful contests like Happy Moments and the McDonalds Big Mac Chant video contest.
Then there was the success of the blogger events we’ve had, like the Chipster Pajama Party and Maxis Wild “Live” Blogging. The results of these campaigns were mind-blowing. Rather than just looking at masses of numbers on a report sheet, advertisers could analyse what bloggers had done to push their brands. Search queries for the advertiser’s brands would bring up fun and down-to-earth content that these campaigns have produced. Google “Chipster Potato Chips” and you’ll see what I mean. The buzzword that has engulfed the Web 2.0 marketing age is “viral”. Marketers have been seeking the viral impacts that have made so many brands (like YouTube) instant successes. These viral success stories have cast digital media in a positive light. Through our work, I have found that an extensive blog marketing strategy is integral to any viral campaign. Blogs are interactive and dynamic media, which create conversations, and when managed, these positive conversations continue into the depths of cyberspace and the consciousness of the modern consumer.