Promotional Blogs on the Rise

This article from ClickZ makes its point rather well: Marketers are increasingly successful at luring consumers into participating in a campaign. That could take the form of directing the consumer to a blog (or other website), call a number or some other interactive experience. It’s great and more power to them.

I will disagree with Tessa Wegert, the writer, on the power of vlogs. As I mentioned in my Emerging Technology piece, video is – for the time being – a non-portable medium. Unless you’ve hacked your PSP and can put a vlog or other video file on it you can’t watch a video on the train or while on a weekend drive. I think it’s great that high-profile studio releases such as Jackson’s King Kong and Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns are providing these interviews, set glimpses and more in the videos but that format is still only going to have limited reach.

Let’s not rush to vlogs too quickly or we will overlook the potentials podcasting and other audio marketing have. First and foremost there’s portability. There’s also the issue of sharing. It’s easy to make a permanent copy of an audio file that is compatible wherever you might need to take it (in the form of a CD). If you create a CD-R with the video file on it you have to worry about software compatability and such.

–Chris