Risks:
1. How successful of a seeding mechanism is this? What is the probability that any campaign will actually take off?
2. How much control does a brand have over negative posts and comments?
3. Even if there is some level of control (I doubt there is any systematic or automated approach), will brands, agencies, and advertisers be willing to devote the necessary resources to manage negative postings and comments?

Reward:
1. Viral Word of Mouth Campaign spreads through trusted sources and results in a 5x performance increase over standard campaigns.

Bottom Line:
Why would advertisers want to take significant risk if there is low probability for reward? It doesn’t seem as though placing an ad on an influential/connected/well-read blogger’s site HOPING that other bloggers write a positive post linking to the brand or readers comment is a highly probable way of seeding conversation? Why will bloggers or readers take these actions and how often will their interests align with the brand in an advertisement?

It seems like you can’t play both sides of wanting seeding for a campaign to be highly successful while not overtly directing bloggers and users how to post and comment. Not that I am a total fan of pay per post, but it seems to make more sense for brands given that users and brands are on the same page; leaving it up to users to decide what to do is opening yourself up to too much risk and not enough reward.

It would be great to hear a brand’s perspective on this.

All this coming from two dudes in pay per post! An industry that is re-defining spam.

Seriously guys, wake up. You swim in VERY VERY murky water and both your company names are the antithesis of your end results.

Please save yourself another black-eye and stop trying to pull the cashmere (i.e. well ’spun’ wool) over the advertiser, they’re not that dumb.

Kudos MA. Job well done.

“It is a pioneer in the automation of mobile and web advertsing by creating the only self serve and fully automated marketplace for CPC and CPM advertising .”

>> you might want to check out http://adsense.google.com and http://adwords.google.com

P.S.: “RegistRATION is free…”

Doesn’t good public relations accomplish the same goal without the stain of a money transfer? Sure, paying for a placement guarantees the message comes out exactly how the company wants, but the damage to reputation when the arrangement is revealed (and as your reference to “early efforts” shows, it always seems to be uncovered) is huge. If PR can get you to 80% accuracy in message delivery why risk the downside to get to 100% accuracy (ye old 80/20 rule)? Am I missing something here?

If you are a company looking at this holistically, I’m not sure you need conversational advertising when other slightly more reputable avenues already exist.

Full disclosure: I work for a PR firm. I hope that doesn’t undermine the legitimacy of these observations.

Great point John.

Having said that, I think your slam on businesses (like ours) that connect advertisers with publishers who are willing to write about them for compensation is naive. It has happened in one way or the other in the traditional media world for.. well… forever. And there will always be a market for this service. Being a market maker for a valuable service is a great business – and certainly Ted (and others) have the investors to prove it.

Should publishers disclose? Yes. Should they only write about things that will be relevant to their audience and accretive to their business? Sure. But don’t discount the potential of these kinds of businesses. Rather push for better standards, higher quality, and more transparency.

http://gatesand...s.blogspot.com/

Interesting. I hadn’t heard about conversational advertising before this, although I’m pretty sure I have seen it happening.

Now it’s not even close to being mainstream, right? So, why just tracking tools for conversational ads, and not, say for example, creation tools for conversational ads?

Not to step into your back-n-forth with Ted M., but SocialSpark seems to be providing the tools/services for creating these ads, yes?

Federated Media (our advertising partner) has been experimenting with “conversational marketing” almost since their launch in 2005. Today they are launching a new marketing toolbox for advertisers which gives them tools to track all the ways users …

“Ted, the difference with anything we’ve ever done was that they were placed in ad units, not editorial.”

While I believe you really wanted to see the movie “Wanted” I don’t see how it is relevant to a blog about tech and startups.

http://urlbrief.com/92314a

What I do see is 200+ free tickets to an early showing in a private theatre (street value of $4,000 give or take) provided to TechCrunch, in exchange for promotion of the advertiser. This post was in the editorial content of your blog. If not for the free tickets I don’t see how this post would have ever been a subject of relevance to your readers. It is sponsored content, bought and paid for with movie tickets.

Your own quote:
“Why are MySpace and TechCrunch doing this? Just to say thank you to our readers and encourage warm fuzzy, advertisement-clicking feelings in you all.”

Giving things away doesn’t mitigate the fact that value changed hands in exchange for inclusion within the editorial of your blog.

I am not saying this is wrong, to the contrary I think it is great. You disclosed that there was a relationship in the post and you provided the advertiser a great service. As an advertiser I would buy posts like this all day. I just want you to acknowledge that value is value, no matter if it is cash, movie tickets or a video camera. All of this is sponsored content and should be treated as such.

We have our conflicts noted on the about page, and again in any posts where there is a conflict (and there are very few). And we’ve certainly never entertained the notion of taking money for any post, which is the backbone of your ridiculous business.

Announcements like this and others demonstrate that sponsored content continues to grow, and it’s nice to see the transparency value behind disclosure policies come into focus for all participants….