Reaching for the blogosphere

Singapore - Asian blog advertising community, Nuffnang launched in Singapore three weeks ago allowing advertisers to serve graphic ads on blogs signed up to the platform - the Singapore platform currently has 750 blogs.

Co-founder for Nuffnang, Ming Shen Cheo told Marketing that its business in Singapore would involve "two distinct phases" with the first being more about gathering blogger membership numbers to get "the critical mass and diversity required to be relevant to advertisers", while the second phase involves marketing the product to advertisers.

"Any online interactive strategy that does not engage the blogosphere meaningfully is weakened to a significant extent. Marketers should take this online platform seriously, because we offer a comprehensive solution to offer them the kind of engagement we're talking about and more," he said.

Nuffnang started out in Malaysia three moths ago and according to Ming has around 2200 blogs signed up on its Malaysian platform representing 4.5 million unique visitors monthly, and serving 20 million ad impressions a month. The maiden campaign launched on Nuffnang's Singapore platform was done by Nike Singapore.

"They are a forward thinking company that was really interested in tapping into this new medium. So far, their campaign has seen an admirable response and our objective is to provide advertisers with a one stop agency to actively engage the blogosphere. Our positioning as a community rather than a platform or network, allows us to build 3-way relationships between ourselves, the advertisers and the bloggers," he said.

Nuffnang works by getting bloggers on supported platforms such as Blogspot and Liquidblade, to sign up and complete a survey about their audience demographics - they would then have to paste a HTML code allowing Nuffnang to track their statistics as well as serve banner ads onto designated spaces.

Advertisers that sign up to ‘buy an ad' submit information such as targeting criteria and budget where selections and suggestions are made by Nuffnang for the advertiser to consider. Once the advertiser approves the blogs selected, the campaign is launched.

"You've got all the traditional benefits of online marketing, which includes the ability to track results, control your costs, and launch interactive creative concepts. Added to this however, is the fact that blogs are opinion makers. We don't stop at banner advertisements - although this is our mainstay, we manage the blog's responses and give our advertisers a complete breakdown of how their banner campaign performed, what the bloggers were saying about their product, or campaign and make it all at once accessible," Ming said.

For now there are three advertising units offered by Nuffnang - the leaderboard, skyscraper and large rectangle unit.