Om Malik, Paul Kedrosky, Fred Wilson, Michael Arrington, Richard MacManus and a couple other Federated Media writers were part of a slogan campaign from Microsoft describing how they were “people ready” and are coming under fire by some that they were endorsing the company without proper disclosure according to a post by Valleywag.

I know what you’re thinking, hey, it’s just Valleywag the National Enquirer of Sillicon Valley — me too — but it has been confirmed in a mea culpa by Om Malik where he apologizes to readers for his lack of transparency on the campaign.

Om writes:

The fact of the matter is that the original premise of the campaign was to give my thoughts by what People Ready meant to me – it wasn’t an endorsement of a specific Microsoft product. (You can read it here, and judge for yourself.) Nor did my words run in any portion of our editorial space. Microsoft asked us to join a conversation, and we did. I wasn’t paid to participate in the conversation, but Microsoft ran an ad-campaign that paid us on the basis of CPM.

Om stopped and removed the campaign that had been running for two months at his flagship blog Gigaom which impacted the ads running across the FM network for others. Michael Arrington responded on Crunchnotes mad that the ads were pulled:

We do these all the time…generally FM suggests some language and we approve or tweak it to make it less lame. The ads go up, we get paid. This has been going on for months and months - at least since the summer of 2006. It’s nothing new. It’s text in an ad box. I think people are pretty aware of what that means…which is nothing.

Fred Wilson happily ran the advertising too and is hoping they will return:

Bottom line is that I am all for any form of advertising that takes some risks, makes the medium a bit more interactive, extends the conversation. Blogging doesn’t play by traditional media rules. That’s why it’s great. Blog advertising shouldn’t play by traditional media rules either. I am proud to be a participant in this campaign and think it makes me even more credible.

As of this writing no response from Paul Kedrosky’s ironically titled infectious greed Update 6/23/07 11:05am PST: correction, Paul offers this:

Sure, this blog thing is a one-man show, and, sure, the people at Federated Media who rep my ad space are well-meaning folks, but I still should have taken more time and said “No” to an ad whose style could so easily be misconstrued. My mistake, but the ad and associated campaign are now gone.

Richard MacManus labels the situation a “storm in a teacup” — and yet ends his post wondering what we think.

What do I think?
First, my own disclaimers: I’ve said dozens, maybe hundreds of times over the years that I have zero problem with advertising. We run ads here and we have other ad supported sites. I even do a small few paid reviews here and there — all with clear disclosure in bold at the beginning of the post — using the service ReviewMe. Those who want to discount those posts can easily skip past them. It’s a very small percentage of the overall editorial and I only do paid reviews for products/services that I’m genuinely interested in and can write completely freely about the experience: good, bad and/or indifferent.

I would never take a penny for anything where I can’t be completely honest about whether or not I like the product. My preference is not to run advertising where I haven’t tried the product/service, or interested in it or believe readers might be interested but there are some cases like contexual ads from Adsense where the ability to filter non-preferred ads is limited (can filter by domain, but not by keywords). I stopped using YPN on most our sites because the ads often were horribly targeted, showing generic mortgage advertisements for example.

Sidenote: our group blog VTOReality.com ran into an ethical advertising situation where we were receiving advertising requests for services that buy and sell gold and provide power leveling services in games. These services often violate the Terms of Service of the games and can ruin the experience for gamers who play the game for fun, so our group voted not to accept any of these ads.

With that hopefully readers fully understand where I’m coming from regarding advertising and the importance of disclosure.

It seems from reading the responses from the FM writers accused of not providing adequate disclosure that are for the campaign are focusing on the advertising where I completely support them in their right to run the ads and not the slogan pages where their names and quotes were being used. I’ve seen a lot of quotes and names used on products of questionable value. Is Microsoft a “People Ready” company? I don’t feel that way.

It’s problematic when you put your name on something that sucks. I bought and reviewed a product called ID Vault that Kevin Mitnick was promoting and found the product to be lacking. Result? Credibility hit for product and for any product Mitnick endorses in the future.

If Microsoft had come to me and wanted to pay me to be part of this campaign here at Hmm, I would have requested a disclaimer on the page where the quote was used that I was making money indirectly by providing the quote and barring that would have written about it in advance or passed on the program altogether. It doesn’t appear — and please correct me if I’m wrong — that any of the FM bloggers did this. Instead, they took the money like it was any other advertisement offer and participated in these sponsored pages. The ads are fine, no problem there, but the People Ready endorsement page seems to be what some people are questioning.

If you look at the screenshot above of these People Ready pages they do have a “sponsored by Microsoft” at the very top of the page. That seems like resonable disclosure to me that the campaign itself is sponsored but what are the people being quoted below getting for doing this? There is a also a spot for you to submit your own “people ready” story. Those who submit their stories aren’t getting paid from what I can see, so not sure how that factors into the situation, but if you or I submit our People Ready stories are we making any money? If the answer is no for us, but yes for the FM bloggers then that should be disclosed somewhere. I didn’t see it.

All in all, I tend to lean toward Richard MacManus assessment that the advertising on the FM bloggers sites isn’t a big deal, but I can see why people are questioning the People Ready pages. It’s too bad none of these bloggers thought to write about this program in advance. If they did, then please tell me about it in the comments below because that does make a difference.

In general, I wouldn’t suggest putting your name and quote next to any product/service you are getting paid for — directly or indirectly — without some type of clear disclosure. That’s the only way to avoid these types of situations. I do understand and somewhat agree with Fred Wilson that blogs should be given more creativity with advertising than traditional media, however, the FTC doesn’t like deceptive advertising and will take issue with it when reported. Creative is one thing, deceptive is another. Was this situation deceptive? The advertising on the FM blogger sites no, the sponsored People Ready pages? That’s a bit more murky.

Like Richard, I’ll defer this to readers to discuss and will continue to read what others think. It’s an important issue for any ad supported website to analyze.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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