Blogvertising

[Tags: interactivepr, pr, blogvertising]. There's a well informed overview of the use of blogging for PR in the Feb 2 edition of New Media Age. And even better: the writer of the case study has published that part online, as well as an outline of the process he went through in writing it - particularly useful as New Media Age required subscription to access its content. Kudos to Graham Holliday, then, who has in the process made his work blogger-friendly...

Here's a quote:

"In October 2005, Budget raised the blogvertising bar. It launched an online/offline treasure hunt called Up Your Budget. Participants had to follow daily video clues posted to the Up Your Budget blog and find sixteen stickers placed in public locations throughout sixteen US cities. The total prize money on offer was US$160,000.

Using treasure hunts for advertising is nothing new. What is new is that this campaign was advertised solely on blogs and relied partly on spreading virally from blog to blog as bloggers joined in the treasure hunt and wrote about it on their own blogs.

...There was no traditional press release. The campaign was first reported on by the AdRants and MarketingVox blogs. US$22,000 was spent for advertising on 177 blogs and generated 50% of the campaign's traffic at a cost of US$0.25 per click.

“The cost of the campaign - including prizes and ad spend – was less than a 30-second spot on a highly rated primetime TV show,” says Budget Car Rental’s Executive Vice President of Marketing, Scott Deaver.

This low cost, blog-based campaign garnered some impressive results. Bloggers wrote hundreds of posts about the campaign resulting in as many as 20,000 unique visitors an hour to the Budget blog and well over 1 million unique visitors over the four weeks of the campaign. “Several thousand people registered to play the game and to have author privileges on the Treasure Hunter blog. This is the first commercial blog project with so many people contributing content,” says Ochman. Ochman tweaked the blog and the advertising as the campaign progressed. “The beauty of blog advertising is that you can test, change and learn in an hour.” In relation to other blog advertising campaigns Budget’s was also deemed a success. “UpyourBudget was in the upper quartile of campaigns in terms of clickthroughs,” says Henry Copeland, founder of BlogAds.com."