Slashdot Mirror
Blogs, Games and Advertising
bippy writes "Video game companies have found a way around the natural distrust we all have of advertising and it's called the blog, RedAssedBaboon reports. The article points to a recent story by the Chicago Tribune about blogs as ads, and then talks about the Beta-7 and ILoveBees campaigns. RAB argues that gaming companies are starting to understand the potential of blogs, giving them their full support but also using them to get at the gamer. It raises some interesting questions about ethics, game journalism and advertising."
I've seen a number of "stories" here on Slashdot that look a lot like ads.
Companies get good publicity through blogs because we tend to trust them... Well, there have been quite a few Slashdot "stories" lately from posters with something to gain - such as the editor from Wired magazine.
It's not necessarily the fault of Slashdot or its editors, but one of those classic guerilla marketing tools is to create publicity (good or bad) around your product, service, etc. It works because it's not always recognizable as marketing, but it ends up being effective as such.
Why would I trust a fictional blog meant to increase sales of Halo 2? This is even worse than regular advertising.
</sarcasm>
Anyone else notice how strangly the ilovebees blog has been handled? At first, it was a scared "character" in the story. Now it's taking on the role of some of the ilovebees wikis, in that the "character" has full knowledge of the game and is detailing the story and mysteries.
Aside from all this, the whole ilovebees story has so little in common with Halo 2 it's amazing. I know the AI game was equally separated, but shouldn't a marketing effort like this be bolstering the story? I showed ilovebees to some fellow gamers, and while they thought some of it was cool, they had a hard time figuring out what the revealed "stories" had to do with Halo.
One of these things is not like the others.
You know, the guy who's always plugging his ad-supported blog on Slashdot by turning press releases into Slashdot stories.
Blogs are great because people attribute them to being by "average" people like you or me. I think this will change since a lot of famous people are now blogging, but for now that is still the perception.
So you get an average schmo who tries this product and raves about it for weeks on his blog and it seems a lot more truthful than the usual advertisements which we are used to being full of BS. I remember the first blog ad I saw was for one of those penis-enlargement schemes. The guy went through the product for 6 weeks. It was very well detailed about when and how it helped him. They even did the smart thing by having him doubt that the product was going to work and then completely wowed when it did work. Now testimonials are nothing new in advertising, but I like said we are USED to it in commercials and other ads. We are NOT used to it in blogs so it rings true. This will eventually change.
(and no, I didn't get the penis enlargement thing. and pure curiousity would be the answer for those questions as to how I saw it in the first place :p. I drive a toyota camry so I'm fine with my family jewels. No need for hummers here!)
I can feel the pain of advertisers to a degree.. their most important target audience no longer gives them the time of day.
However, this is by far one of the most deceptive solutions to that problem. You play on the consumer's idea of trust and take advantage of it, instead of working within its bounds. Granted, this is how a lot of advertising works, but pretending to be a "news source" is downright immoral and really makes me think twice as a consumer.
You know, Burger King's "Subservient Chicken" campaign featured a lot of the benefits of these campaigns without going to the depths of pretending to be a reliable source. I would hate to think our potential trust of blogs could disappear because we can't trust the messenger to be what they say they are.
You're advertisers; tell us that's what you are, and if you don't plan on doing that, don't pretend that you're something you're not.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
This is not a big deal and will ultimately not succeed much, although I won't say it will totally fail.
Blogs are "pull". You have to choose to read them, and thanks to the wonders of RSS and newsreaders, the majority of most blog's readerships are recurring, from the smallest ones to the largest ones. That is to say, blog readers rapidly get to know the blog, where it is coming from, etc., and make decisions based on that.
If you try to start an astroturfing blog, you'd better have something more substantial than "rah rah rah, product X is great", or people won't subscribe or visit for long. Blogs as pure astroturfing degenerate into astroturfing web pages, and they just don't work.
If you have something more substantial, then you may acquire an audience, but it'll be mostly for the substantial stuff, not the rah rah rah. In fact I know of many blogs that are largely product advocacy blogs, or can be interpreted as such, but are still fascinating because of the beef they have. An example I've been working through lately: The Old New Thing, written by Raymond Chen, an important Windows developer and guru. On the one hand, you could read it as Windows advocacy (though I truly believe it is not intended as such directly), but there is so, so, so much meat there that it is irrelevant. My blog hasn't got a huge readership, but I know the ones I have are there for the substance, because I don't offer much else.
Like I said, astroturfing may not "fail", but it'll be just preaching to the choir, which isn't terribly effective. (The majority of political blogs already boil down to this, although they aren't necessarily intended to be astroturfing.) Nothing to worry about here, just corporate hipsters who aren't.