FTC Cracks Down on Sponsored Bloggers

Many blog posts and "tweets" went out yesterday regarding the Federal Trade Commission's rule updates governing endorsements, and the new guidelines requiring bloggers to clearly disclose any "material connection" to an advertiser, including payments for endorsements or free product.

The new rules go into effect Dec.1 and penalties include $11,000 in fines per violation (blog post).

These rules include posts on review sites such as Yelp or online stores such as Amazon, where the writer is being compensated in some way.

Our take on this whole issue is that social media (whether it be product reviews, news, information, etc) is really about genuine conversations, with open transparency. Good for the FTC to mandate but people who do not come out and say they received a product for free to review or are paid to write a review are not people that web users are going to believe. The web is already pretty self policing. If you really want bloggers and key web influencer's to write something believable, give them the product, and let them be honest and open about it.

Display Advertising: It's Really All About Relevance

Ad Age posted a story today titled "What to Measure? Only 16% of the Web is Clicking on Display Ads" which just screamed to have a blog written from Zig. ComScore and media agency Starcom reported in the recent "Natural Born Clickers" Study that only 8% of internet users account for 85% of all clicks, AND clickers only represent 16% of U.S. internet users.

What's the big Ah Ha?....Targeting Relevance in Display Advertising!

At Zig we don't buy mass reach sites, we buy relevance, and actually we buy contextually relevant pages on contextually relevant sites. Selling paint?... why not be in the painting and decorating section of a DIY/Home Improvement site. Get in front of people who are the closest to making a purchase decision about your product(s) as possible! This type of targeting has helped us increase purchase intent for many of our clients at the conclusion of their digital campaigns.

It is also important to note that display ads may often lead to increases in search engine traffic on sites like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing (Microsoft). All the more reason to have a truly integrated digital campaign, using multiple strategies such as display ads, emails, search, social media and more.