Integrity, Branding, and Blog Payola

Eris Free, Paul Scrivens, and Molly Holzschlag have all touched an emerging issue in marketing—blog payola.

Marqui is a new company with an interesting business model. Companies pay them to get their products written about in weblogs, and Marqui in turn pays certain webloggers a monthly fee to write about the products. Despite Marqui’s efforts to emphasize transparency, many people are reacting negatively to this new method of marketing.

Advertising in new areas always generates friction. Similar problems were debated when weblogs first started using text ads, affiliate links, etc. The issue here, however, is that this advertising isn’t tucked away in a sidebar somewhere. It’s a normal blog entry in the author’s own words.

Marqui isn’t asking webloggers to be deceptive. Authors are free (and even encouraged) to highlight the post as being sponsored by Marqui. Nevertheless, I suspect this form of advertising is going to generate a fair amount of tension until people get used to the idea. Marqui may not be successful in this particular endeavor, but sponsored blogging will be part of life sooner or later. That much is inevitable.

This controvery will be difficult for Marqui to deal with, but their business model has a more fundamental flaw. It’s based on the naïve assumption that you can simply drop something onto a few weblogs and have it take off as the Next Hot Meme.

It doesn’t work like that. Companies working with Marqui to promote their goods or services will very quickly find out that nobody cares. The paid webloggers will make their obligatory post and collect their checks, but the meme will end there.

That thud you hear is a viral marketing campaign hitting the floor.

I don’t know how long Marqui will be able to keep it up. Sponsored blogging will succeed someday, but my gut tells me that this won’t be the one.