Toyota has launched a podcast campaign to promote its Lexus IS, in partnership with Vibe Magazine and independent hiphop/jazz fusion recerd label Hidden Beach Recordings. The campaign is supported by blog advertising. The site features downloadable MP3s, and the ability to subscribe to them, of half-hour samples of Unwrapped CD series.

According to a ClickZ article, the campaign is targeted at an African-American audience, and blogs play a “pretty heavy part” of the campaign, according to a Toyota spokesperson quoted in the article. I have to say, that seems a bit curious to me. I wonder if they did much demographic research about podcast users and blog readers to determine whether it was a good fit with an African-American target audience. The few black bloggers I know all seem to take perverse pleasure in their being among the few black bloggers out there. I suppose like anything that is changing and blogs will continue to gain traction across all demographic segments, but it strikes me as a pretty rarified audience segment they’re targeting.

Anyway, I do think that the idea of using custom podcast content is a good strategy for making use of podvertising. And the grooves are definitely funky. Good exposure, in any event, for Hidden Beach, which I’m adding to my music watch-list. (Ironically, I don’t see that HiddenBeach.com links to the co-branded podcast site. Details, details…)

Fast Company blogs about an interesting blogging experiment that does a twist on reality TV shows like The Restaurant.

With the help of the firm Transformist and a team of experts, Alane Ebner sets out to develop an architecture business in 10 weeks. Best of all, she and her team blog about their progress at Alane By Day.

While most of us who start a business don’t have the benefit of having
a team of experts mentoring us gratis, there’s still a lot to learn
from the day-to-day activities chronicled at Alane By Day.

Things like 13 strategies to start your own firm, how to develop an identity, or finding your customers
can be beneficial to any one who’s just beginning a business…or
anyone who’s running an established business, for that matter.

With
80% of new businesses failing in the first year, this blog makes for
interesting reading. Although other blogs have chronicled the start-up
phase, often there wasn’t a team of experts working to make the company
a success. Anyone who learns business lessons from The Apprentice might
be interested in picking up the thread in Alane By Day.

As of this writing, the blog is already at day 13 of 82, so there’s a number of posts to catch up on.

My favorite new artist/blogger.

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SignsNeverSleep.com is the blog of the Lincoln Sign Company, based in Lincoln, New Hampshire. It’s a charming blog, nicely designed (better, frankly, than the company’s main web site, if you ask me), and a neat mix of recently completed examples of the company’s work, a glimpse of the process of sign making in progress and personal news (a weekend hike, what J.D. is reading, a bear sighting, photos of the kids, etc.). J.D. Illes writes me:

We just recently started a weblog as the first stage in a whole redesign of our web-presence.  We are a small, custom-commercial signshop in a small resort community.

I think our blog will be a terrific tool to show our customers what it is we do.  Usually a customer comes by to visit just after we have spilled paint all over their sign by accident, not when we have just completed a beautiful project.  I am hoping giving them a peek inside our doors on a daily basis will help them get to know us.

…

Thanks

J.D. Iles

Thanks for the note, J.D., and best of luck!

UPDATE:
Paul Chaney of Radiant Marketing Group read this post and was apparently so interested that he tracked down J.D. of Lincoln Signs for an interview about why he’s blogging.

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I would have to say this is one of the most innovative blog projects I’ve seen in a while. The site explains its mission thusly:

For Art of Speed, Nike commissioned 15 talented young filmmakers to interpret the idea of speed. Over the course of 20 days, this weblog will introduce these innovative directors, their short films, and the digital technology behind the scenes.

Combining two of my favorite trends: advertainment (advermovies, in this case) and business blogging. What else can I say?

Hardly surprising that the creative engine behind this project is Nick Denton‘s Gawker Media. On Nick’s personal site, he writes a more detailed and thoughtful explanation of what the new site is about and the future of this kind of “campaign blog,” which he likens, appropriately, I believe, to a magazine’s “special advertising section”:

Gawker has produced an Art of Speed weblog, consisting of items about the films, their makers, and digital filmmaking in general. The microsite is at www.gawker.com/artofspeed. It’s a month-long temporary weblog, written by Remy Stern of newyorkish.com, and designed by Patric King of House of Pretty.
…
In principle, campaign weblogs allow a marketer to participate in the weblog conversation, rather than observe it as a passive sponsor. Now we’ll just have to see whether they work.

There is a lot more to his post than what I’ve quoted here, but rather than just reprinting the whole thing, I’d encourage you to read it for yourself. There is no doubt this is a seminal event in the development of business blogs. The NYT also reports on this project.

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Hugh MacLeod is best known around the blogosphere as “the guy who draws cartoons on the back of business cards.” Something about his cartooning style has really struck a nerve with bloggers. His own blog features a lot of his original drawings. His background is in advertising creative, and I think he still does some of that on a freelance basis, as well.

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Avis Valentine
spokes mannequin

Artist Brandy Agerbeck uses Movable Type Blogger.com to present the merchandise in her store, where she does the fulfillment through Cafe Press. Very clever use of a business blog, where the blog is the business.

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