Product Placement and Reviews Are The Most Important Things.
I just read that what is dying is not the Washington Post and the NYT and the LA Times, but all of traditional media. The grounds: advertising this way doesn't work now and probably never did work for most people.
Yes!
I am sure that lots of people have been preaching some version of this at conferences. But it is true.
I am different from those guys because I know what does work: sponsored testimonials during shows. I know that it was the old-TV and radio way. But the products I remember today are the ones that the hosts on the local radio show hawk: a car dealer especially, who gives one of the hosts a new car to drive every so often.
It's going to be much more labor-intensive than having a nice ad prepared as a production unto itself. You have to pick your guys. Larry King and the grape juice is great; Ernie Harwell was great. And those were national.
Today it will be bloggers. I am not kidding. The methodology for paying bloggers on Amazon, Google, etc..., is very safe. They know exactly what works. A link from Instapundit for a book on making your own beer will probably sell 100 copies of the book. The same link with a positive referral will probably sell 100 more. However many it sells, you pay the commission on. For a big site like his, he'll charge a flat fee too. And then he's on the constant project of selling and re-building his credibility. But as long as there is the direct link between the sale and the placement, the commissions are easy to determine. And as long as the site is a generally good source of referrals, flat fees will come, especially for the products least likely to sell.
The risks are small: for the vendor, there is a risk that people will buy through me who would have bought a product anyway. But that can be managed by reducing the commission on 'best sellers' or other things that don't depend on referrals. For me, the risk is that I make the sale but the customer goes direct to the vendor. The vendor has little incentive to encourage that (i.e., through price cuts) on any small-ticket item, and probably has incentive to discourage it in the interest of maintaining its own knowledge of where sales are coming from.
In many ways, it's a fantastic system. I want to recommend things people actually like so they use me again; the vendor wants the same thing since each sale is a small amount for it. Consumers' long-term respect for the blogger is the key, and both the vendor and the blogger want the blogger to have it.
The biggest problem is price competition. I recommend a great item on Amazon, a reader finds it new through ebay, and the ebay vendor pays nothing. That is the problem, especially with higher ticket items.
So the problem to solve is that high-price items yield big commissions from even a small number of sales but they are the items for which people comparison shop. Does that mean that big-ticket vendors should offer commissions?
How to research this? I'm sure it's been a model for camera sales for a while. And I know that bloggers ask me to order through their Amazon links.
My own plan is to get Netflix to start referral fees for its under-ordered DVDs. They will list 5000 movies that are under-used, and bloggers like me will write reviews of the ones they like with links. Twenty cents for each order from a subscriber, $1 for each new subscriber. I will be rich soon. How could it fail? (Please tell me this is not already being done on aint it cool or something like that.)
Cite: http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/05/not_death_of_newspapers_but_de.php#more
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