Tag : adweek

Adweek has an interesting article about sponsored blog posts and sites like Gawker and Digg “lending a hand with brands looking to fit into their environments without being relegated to the sidelines with run-of-the-mill banner ads”. I think this is a very smart proposition because it is one way for a brand to get access to a section of their audience that would be very difficult to reach otherwise. They mention the example of Federated Media crafting a sponsored blog post for Virgin America, in the design-conscious Apartment Therapy blog, that spoke of Virgin’s plush leather seats and soft lighting. The idea was to distinguish Virgin from low-cost competitors like Southwest Airlines.

When we heard that digital shopping site Honeyshed had been revamped, we couldn’t help but pay attention (thanks to Greg Verdino). Honeyshed got off to a not-so-good start about a year ago. It launched in October 2007 as the brainchild of Droga5, Publicis Groupe and Digitas. After a year of hibernating in beta-mode, during which period the maximum number of hits they were able to garner per month was 7000, they recently officially relaunched. It has been billed as ‘QVC meets MTV’ by its creators. The truth of that – ahem – description is for the site’s users to decide. 

Adweek published a great article this week by Benjamin Palmer of the Barbarian Group. It it, he challenges the ad industry to stop being scared, embarrassed and confused by “Web 2.0″ and to start exploiting crowd-sourced creativity from within as well as radically new ways of working together. He urges both advertising creative and television commissioning people to learn from the way ideas are generated and developed in a Web 2.0 world.