Hey, let’s face it, there is a lot of masturbating going on in advertising these days. As more smart advertising guys try to figure how to monetize your ”conversations” it’s probably only going to get worse.
Some of those smart guys at the forefront of social graph whoring are found in Federated Media (FM). Founded by John Battelle, an industry leader in search, with good hair, FM works with a bunch of well-known publishers and helps them replace teeth-whitening adverts with boring but high-paying campaigns from Microsoft. Publishers do like money, so normally this would be a good thing.
After checking our sources at various publications that use FM or have in the past, we hear both good and bad things. Some are very happy with the service, others not so much. A few conversations about FM actually felt like ex-girlfriend breakup stories that I had to slowly step away from (AWKWARD).
We don’t have much personal experience with FM: despite several attempts they never returned our calls, emails or even tweets. We literally tried every method but I guess we aren’t a good match for them. Perhaps it’s because I write articles with ”Jerk Them Off” in the title? Too hard to say.
In any case, and cutting the chase, local mommy blogger and trouble maker Jessica Gottlieb recently crossed paths with them and, as usual, can’t shut up about it. Apparently after blogging about FM she received an interesting comment from someone named ”Jackmayofferr”, get it? WAKKA WAKKA. Normally witty comment troll names are a dime a dozen, but in this case it appears the troll might actually be a Federated Media employee. Let’s look closer.
Jessica, who likely watches too much CSI, checked the IP address of the comment troll and sure enough, it points to a user in San Francisco and even labels the ISP as Federated Media Publishing.
Hmm that’s strange and not normal? Is that John Battelle himself or some lowley underling at FM? Who knows.
I actually can appreciate an employee fighting for his team in the comments. I do it all the time, much to the dismay of MySpace PR. However I usually do this under my real name, or at least cover my tracks a little better.
You can follow the story in more detail over at jessicagottlieb.com.
