Unspun

To the Doubting Thomasses who have often cast aspersons on how someting as inane as a blog can make money, here’s a prediction from Oon Yeoh of The Edge, Malaysia’s most reputable business publication, on his predictions for 2007:

1. Jeff Ooi makes big bucks
Hot on the tracks of LG and Intel, two companies that have dared to promote their products via Jeff’s (in)famous blog, other international corporations decide to try out non-traditional promotion and marketing (the local companies still shy away though).

This development is disruptive in two ways. One is that it starts to break up the traditional media’s grip on advertising as companies begin to search for new ways to reach out to target demographics. We’re not talking about old-school, 20^th century banner ads but innovative approaches where the advertisement becomes part of the content and vice versa.

The other great impact is that traditional media placement companies will be at a loss on how to deal with this development. They are experts at dealing with traditional media but don’t have a clue on how to deal with bloggers, who are mavericks by definition (well, the popular and infamous ones are). Neither are they familiar with the out-of-the-box approaches that are needed for this kind of New Media advertising to work.

Jeff Ooi, Malaysia’s most popular blogger, is one of the few who havedared to experiment with using his blog to make money. So far there does not seem to be any negative repercussions with him going commercial. All good signs for bloggers.

And bad signs for traditional media. One if finally dawns on marketers that blogs could be a much more effective and credible medium of advertisement/public relations/promotions they will be gravitating to the new media. And all of this is happening in neighboring Malaysia, not some high-tech, IT culture in the Western hemisphere. Should be an inspiration for bloggers and mud in the eye for traditional mediapeople.