Who you gonna believe? More importantly, who believes you?

A revealing story from AdAge’s Gavin O’Malley startled this blog with survey results indicating nearly half of the responding marketing execs paid for product placement in content. In content. I guess you have to keep the term that broad because I can’t think of many media free from placement at the moment. Maybe the Congressional Record or certain religious texts, and they’re probably vulnerable.

There are obvious reasons to protect objectivity, beyond the obvious ethical issues. Even household pets with a capacity for long-term thinking won’t soil their own territories. You would think marketing could rise to that level. Or as Mark Haas was quoted:

“When people see the erosion of concepts like objectivity, they start to lose faith in any organization claiming to be objective.”

It makes sense that the craving for objectivity increases as we sense the supply dwindling, and many have decried the very idea of people being paid to blog about a company. How can paid bloggers claim objectivity? Why should they have to? Thanks a lot, 48.9% of marketing executives.

There are endless hectares of text on the subject of payblogging, not just because it’s an important issue, but because bloggers love to blog about blogging
But a corporate blog is not product placement in someone else’s content. Instead it lives in its own content. What makes an audience uncomfortable is a sense that they’re being misled in context or point of view. So when this blog discusses Ad Giants specifically, we don’t claim objectivity, just honesty, as we explain in the sidebar.
If you believe in something, you advocate it, and as long as you’re up front and using your own content, you’re demonstrating respect for the audience. If you were running for office, I’d hope you would vote for yourself.

Still, readers might like to know who’s typing these stings of characters, so here it is. My name is Fred, and I’ve known two of the Ad Giants for many, many years. We worked together at an ad agency long ago, and we share a world view that includes this simple concept: It is a responsibility of creativity to solve problems. I think the Ad Giants approach to managing brands across complex organizations, territories and media handily hurdles that bar. Happily, others agree, judging by the new clients, so I’m glad to sit in the hotseat of this blog for a while. And I mean that literally. The Ad Giants supplied me with a sweet Macbook Pro, and it gets toasty. They’re also paying me something for my time, and while no one knows where this blog adventure will lead, I’m fairly certain that the friendships will survive, because we operate off of the same values.

Meanwhile we promise not to pay for placement in content that’s not our own, though we might start our own show, maybe Pimp my Brand.
(test post)

[tags] product placement, objectivity, Ad Giants [/tags]