:: adgruntie :: So very pathetic

+ So, today I got an email from ASA Bailey . They wanted me to talk about their interview in PR Week which discusses the Ogilvy hijack which I posted on November 6th, after finding it on AdLand that same day. Well, sad to say, I'm probably not going to talk about what they want me to.

You see, at the start of the interview as well as the end they get a fact wrong. An important fact when you're talking about seeding blogs. They should know better which makes me have trouble getting past it. It isn't the publication or interviewer who got it wrong, unless they heard ASA Baily wrong. How do I know? Well it's all in the last question.

Q."How did you push that message out?
A. As far as we know, we [track] the largest network of viral blogs and websites. It’s very easy for us to spread anything. The network currently has 22.4 million unique users. This is only through our knowledge of the system. How did we get the Ogilvy & Mather out? We got someone independent to do it for us. They sent it to Ad Rants. It’s how the blogs work. They create their own feeding frenzy. A blogger visits a blog, reads the article, and then puts it on [his or her] own blog.

So, here's the problem. AdLand posted Ogilvy London Hijacked November 6th, after getting a news submission from lpc24, a user (a.k.a. adgrunt) of the site. Adrants didn't post about this until November 7th. The AdLand post has 9 trackbacks and 35 comments. Adrants post has 1 trackback and 5 comments. It doesn't even come up in the first 5 pages of a google search for "Ogilvy Hijacked".

So it seems obvious that ASA has their facts wrong. Shame that. You see, as easy as it is to spread a viral campaign, it can also be just as easy to find the holes in the message that people want to send, especially with the internet and time stamped blogs. Perhaps ASA Bailey needs to go back to the basics when it comes to spreading information, and try to spread the facts. ;-)

Read related stuff here and here and here.