Starting today, we begin a new series of short interviews with bloggers, podcasters, and others in the social media realm. We are very pleased to kickoff this series with Henry Copland of Blogads.com. Enjoy!
How did you first learn about blogging?
Henry Copland: It was a series of small awakenings. If memory serves, Nick Denton told me about ObscureStore.com sometime in 2001 and I became hooked. I was living in France and started reading a couple of LA friends’ blogs. I became convinced that blogging was the best way for our small business, Pressflex.com, to communicate its vision with customers and staff and started a company blog in early September 2001. Then 9/11 happened and I found that the only meaningful way, for me at least, to get news and keep in touch with the volcano of news and emotions was through blogs, rather than through polished and packaged media.
Do you blog yourself?
Henry: I blog every week or two, with more frequent personal updates on my twitter page. (Twitter is a platform that lets you push snippets of info — no more than 140 characters — to a select list of friends.)
What do you think about Twitter? Is it here to stay?
Henry: I like the Twitter guys, but have no idea whether their particular service, per se, is the ultimate expression of the idea. But the idea of short bursts of information sent to select networked people IS very cool, and we’ll likely see lots more in that vein.
Getting back to blogs, which are your favorites?
Henry: I still love ObscureStore.com. I read Buzzmachine daily. Other than that, I’ll check in on a bunch of political blogs on both sides when I hear something is happening.
What makes a good blog ad?
Henry: You’ve got to think of an ad as content. Does it pack an intellectual punch, or convey some novel news or view, challenge a reader’s expectation, or pique her curiosity? Ideally, the text will have multiple links to separate landing pages and the image won’t look over-produced. Remember, this is a P2P medium and readers don’t want stuff that’s slick and super-packaged. Designers hate this, but they have to throw their skills out the window and "go blog."
What is the most successful blog ad campaign you have ever seen?
Henry: Hmm, well, I can’t talk about anybody’s specific clickthrus. But if you measure success by sales of an idea AND an physical object, it’s probably a blogad for an DVD that ran on blogs in 2005, "The God Who Wasn’t There." The film maker made dozens of different ads, playing with various images and text. He ended up selling tens of thousands of DVDs, and from a polemical point of view I know the campaign provoked a lot of discussion. I still run into people who remember his ads and bought the DVD.
Any recent innovations at Blogads that you would like people to know about?
Henry: We’re seeing lots of success for clients putting their blog or site’s headlines into blogads. Thanks to RSS, the ads update automatically, so blog readers get what they crave most: fresh, very detailed information. We’re also working on providing more results granularity for buyers and easy access to data. Finally, at an organizational level, we’re focused on staff training and internal processes refinement to allow us to continue to grow efficiently.
Note: See Henry’s collection of "great blogads" to get an idea of what works.
- Kevin
