Google is pushing responsive design hard, arguing that ‘optimized’ sites will serve readers better by offering a uniform content experience. (Cynically, one might argue that Google has a strong interest in pushing publishers to push the same content out across multiple devices in various formats so the task of processing and presenting this information is simpler for Google if it’s not different across multiple devices.) The responsive design approach is cheaper for everyone too, since it means publishers don’t have to rethink their content strategies for each new device, just the formatting.

Now advertisers are beginning to explore ways to make their ads responsive. Build one ad, then tweak it automatically so it can run on a half-dozen form factors — desktop, iPad, mini, iPhone, XX and other tablets. You can see an example of one such solution here:

The idea of responsive ads seems silly to me. Imagine trying to build an ad that would “resize” automatically to run on TV, radio, glossy magazines and newspapers. In theory, this might be possible. But this strategy would result in least-common-denominator content, probably just chunks of black and white text. Though even this dumbed down ad wouldn’t work on radio, so maybe a transmitter could be constructed that would turn “responsively” this text into morse code.

Trying to resize both editorial and advertising reflects a giant failure of imagination. Just as the best web sites live and breath in the many dimensions that were unimaginable in the monochrome and two dimensional world of newsprint publishing, the best tablet and mobile sites someday will embody dimensions and colors and experiential textures that aren’t imagined in today’s world of desktop publishing and reading.

By definition, the best ads won’t be responsive; the best content and ads will be unfungible across devices because they’ll embody features that are unique to each tier of device. With this philosophy in mind, Blogads teams are busy working on new ad units that will be uniquely effective on tablets, rather than just resizing versions of desktop ad units. Watch this ever-mutating space to see what we come up with.

Limited Run, a company that helps artists and musicians sell products online, says that 80% of the clicks they bought through Facebook ads came from robots.

Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still, we couldn’t verify more than 15-20% of clicks. So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. Here’s what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn’t on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn’t have JavaScript, it’s very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What’s important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do. We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we’d keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots. That’s correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs.

When Limited Run tried to get more information from Facebook… silence. “So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t reply. Do we know who the bots belong too? No. Are we accusing Facebook of using bots to drive up advertising revenue. No. Is it strange? Yes.”

In the comments, the CEO of Yousites says the same thing happened to his company.

And here’s a deep dive into Facebook “likes” from bots, which concludes that “someone or a group of someones is utilizing bot networks and compromised accounts to sell actions in Facebook, and the voluminous Liking is a byproduct of attempting to randomize any patterns that would identify their core network or their customers.”

And while we’re on the topic of clickbots, don’t forget last year’s attack of the bimbots!

At the time, both claims — that a) traditional publishing was doomed by people-published content and b) that blogging would be lucrative — seemed ludicrous. Shares in The New York Times were just a couple of months shy of their all-time high, $52. Martin Nisenholtz, then managing NYTimes.com, spoke for most media insiders when he dismissed the “weblog phenomenon” as nothing “fundamentally new in the news media.” Though blogs like PoliticalWire, GigOM, Dooce, Instapundit, Largehearted Boy, Kottke, MyDD, BuzzMachine, ObscureStore, Michelle Malkin and TalkingPointsMemo were already posting when I wrote in May of ’02, they were adless. Advertisers trusted only editor-vetted, publisher-backed articles appearing on sites run by august institutions like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Most of the blogosphere did not yet exist. Launch dates stretched into the future for DailyKos (6/02), Gawker (10/02), Towleroad (12/02), Gothamist (1/03), Power Line (1/03), RedState (11/03), Stereogum (11/03), Go Fug Yourself (7/04), ThinkProgress (12/04), Perez Hilton (2/05), SB Nation (03/05), Neatorama (04/05), TechCrunch (6/05), The Pioneer Woman (8/05), Concrete Loop (11/05), Media Takeout (1/06), Jack and Jill Politics (8/06), Flavorwire (11/06), The Blogess (6/07) and millions of smaller blogs.

I’m happy to say that many of those May, 2002 forecasts turned out to be correct. Unfortunately, the blog utopia I dreamed about is today polluted with bad writing, spam, barely disguised flogging and naked opportunism. My old predictions are bolded below, each followed by a current post-mortem.

#1 The networks of bloggers, the blogosphere, powers knowledge-sharing far more profound than anything offered by current media.

TRUE. Clearly the volume of self-published information erupting daily from millions of blogs is several orders of magnitude greater than traditional media can produce. And the intensity with which bloggers can go after a topic exceeds the persistence and massed institutional will of publications like the New York Times or the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal. Bloggers have worked well together to untangle and crowdsource complex topics and news stories, each post linking to the previous blogger’s contribution and adding a tiny amount of new information, whether in unseating Dan Rather from his newsdesk at CBS or in defending Valerie Plame or in figuring out the twists of Johnny Depp’s latest movie or in deconstructing Greece’s bogus budgeteering.

My forecast fell far short of today’s reality, though, by not imagining that even bigger and faster networks for sharing and sorting information would soon emerge around the blogs — YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and Digg and Reddit and Pinterest and Stackoverflow and Instagram, to name just a few.

#2 The blogosphere will enable hundreds of thousands of new idea entrepreneurs to carve out local, ideological or conceptual niches and make a living.

TRUE. Blogs have spawned vigorous self-publishing enterprises, many of which — GigaOM, PerezHilton, Gawker, DailyKos, TalkingPointsmemo, SportsblogsNation — have grown to be mini-empires of their own. By lowering the cost of publishing and tapping into individuals’ raw talents and passions, publishing niches and niches within publishing niches have proliferated. We’ve drilled steadily downward: from mommy blogs to mommy cooking blogs to vegan mommy cooking blogs… dozens of them. Still, sadly, I doubt that we’ve got millions of self-supporting bloggers.

#3 Bloggers are the ultimate speculators! At least 80% of any media organization’s revenues are spent on “overhead” — the executive parking garages, broadcast towers, helpful distribution unions, wood pulpers and stolid German makers of printing presses as big as the Super Dome. Take these costs out of media and you slash the tax on writing — the number of writing jobs and the amount of quality content will rocket.

TRUE. Content volume and categories have grown exponentially, with whole a new industry emerging to keep track of what all these individuals are creating. But if the amount of quality content has rocketed, the quantity of nonquality content has grown even faster. I did not come close to anticipating that the new metastatic branches the PR industry would sprout to give free products to bloggers — from diapers to junkets to electronics to tickets — to try to influence blogger opinions, essentially wiping away a century-old firewall between editorial and advertising.

#4 If the soloists outnumber the orchestra, who conducts? [Economist] James D. Miller argues that a blogging boom will self-destruct. “The proliferation of blogging sites makes it especially difficult for consumers to know which bloggers they would find interesting,” he writes. But Miller’s Malthusian view of blogging focuses exclusively on the blogger’s role in producing words, which is obviously only part of the equation. First, each blogger reads five to 25 other blogs, more than offsetting any word-supply she generates. Second, she evaluates the blogs, recommending a few, ignoring most. So a new blogger is a net contributor of order rather than noise to the blogosphere.

TRUE. The world has not yet drowned in bloggers’ output. If anything, it’s easier to find information today than it was ten years ago. Part of this order results from technology — we’ve got lots of new tools for filtering. But we’re also benefiting from the fact that almost everyone online is doing some amount of curating, masticating giant mounds of information into snackable nutritious infonuggets.

#5 What happens when we have 73 blogs about Wooster, red blogs, prose blogs, gun blogs, ska blogs, braless blogs, blog blogs, bong blogs, 29,471 Boston blogs, when we have three blogs for anyone who thinks for a living or lives for thinking: a blog for work, a blog for play and blog for family?

UNTRUE. Blogs are not ubiquitous, and very few people have three blogs. But the blogging spirit is bigger than ever. Most of us have happily settled for microblogging small imperfect fragments of life, documenting with a button push rather than an entire polished essay: a misspelled one-liner to Twitter, a grainy photo to Instagram, a quick upvote to someone else’s headline posted to Reddit.

#6 What is new is the blogosphere, the endless and (physically) effortless networking of conversations. … As an information processor, the blogosphere superfluizes old media’s expensive and carefully constructed infrastructures and franchises. Suddenly, Vivendi, AOL-Time Warner, EMAP and Newscorp are factories whose economies of scale are swamped by infinity, networks that have come unplugged, refrigerator salesmen trudging into the next ice age.

TRUE. TRUE. TRUE. While some traditional publishers are still going strong — Newscorp shares traded at $15 then and $20 today — many are dead or on life-support or seeking to reinvent themselves as curates of blogs and other micro-content. NYTCO shares have fallen from $50 in May of 2002 to $6.50 today. McClatchy shares, trading at $60 in 2002, are now at $2.20. The Sun Times media group is bankrupt. These graphs say it all. And even giant ad agencies are being disrupted as traditional publishers are replaced by a more efficient social media ecosystem.

#7 The old economics of media – he who controls distribution wins the most readers and serves advertisers best – will be plowed under by a new economics – she who relates best attracts the most valuable audience. (Since relate means connect and tell.)

OFTEN UNTRUE: While we’ve seen that great writing can thrive online, the unrelenting output of the likes of HuffingtonPost proves daily that mass-produced, SEO-optimized crud too often overwhelms the thoughtful work of bloggers with passionate audiences.

#8 The metrics do not yet exist to describe the blogosphere’s commercial potential.

STILL TRUE, SADLY. I’m surprised to say that, ten years on, its still difficult to convince most advertisers that blogs are uniquely valuable. Ad buyers are more focused than ever on simple metrics like cost-per-click and cost-per-acquisition. Ad buyers are too easily swayed by a publisher’s gift of Yankees tickets or Fry boots. Most advertisers do not yet value a blogger’s intimate connection to her/his readers and the overarching value of a blog community’s awareness of a new idea or brand.

#9 The blogosphere’s self-organized networks offer adventurous advertisers the opportunity to target unique and previously unarticulated demographics. Advertising in a blog or blogset will enable an advertiser quickly to communicate with a critical mass of thinkers. … In the beginning, blog advertising will likely be P2P. Ken Layne could sell Dot.con. Glenn Reynolds could sell baseball hats. Tony Pierce could point to his E-Bayed molars, or whatever other teeth he loses. Amy Langfield may promote the 9/11 book. Matt Drudge could sell autographed photos or Tshirts. Many Blogads may be traded gratis among friends. It will be a long haul. Slowly, critical mass will build. New ad classifications will emerge. New demographics will cohere. Companies will be invented to fill new niches.

UNTRUE. Most big blogs today thrive on advertising bought by mass market companies — movies, autos, technology, softdrinks. Niche advertisers — whether local candidates or teeshirt vendors or gardening tool craftspeople — focus on buying highly targeted CPC ads on Google or Facebook.

#10 There are, beyond money, other benefits to creating a blog advertising idiom. Establishing a clear space and format for advertising will clarify what is flogging and what is blogging.

TRUE. But true not enough. Too often, particularly on small blogs, advertising is indistinguishable from editorial.

#11 Eventually, a sufficient density of local blogs could make Blogads an effective tool for selling local goods and services.

UNTRUE, so far. Local blogging has not yet reached sufficient mass to become economically viable or useful to advertisers. And advertisers’ ability to use other ad mechanisms to target niche audiences in tightly defined geographic areas — for example, using CPC Facebook ads to only target women in their twenties in the Cincinatti area — makes ads on local blogs uncompetitive in most instances. Some ad networks now exist that can target specific voters.

#12 To close, I will wager $1000 that on May 25, 2007 there will be more Blogads than NYTimes.com classified ads or that NYTimes.com will be using Blogads. Ready to bet, Martin? (Yes, the winnings will go to the Blog Foundation.)

UNTRUE: Good thing Nisenholtz didn’t take me up that bet. NYT’s classified business was still going strong… in 2007.

It’s that time again, when every media expert and opinionista looks back on the year’s advertising campaigns and lists the best, worst and/or freakiest. Or, in Vader Boy’s case, the most listed in year-end lists. Here are the top ad roundups of 2011, in no particular order.

1. memeburn: Top 15 online ads

The top grin-inducing ad: Coca-Cola "Happiness Truck"

2. Copyranter: The 8 Worst Print Ads of 2011

The most controversial ad for the least controversial product: Milk "Everything I Do is Wrong"

3. Unruly and Mashable: Top 20 Global Social Video Ads Chart

The ad most shared by people who thought they were sharing a clip from the Office: T-Mobile "Royal Wedding"

4. Adweek: The 10 Best Commercials of 2011

The best ad that really makes you think -- until you need to go pick up some groceries: Nissan Leaf "Gas Powered Everything"

5. Harper’s Bazaar: Best Fashion Ads 2011

The ad that best answers the question, "Who are you wearing to the apocalypse?" Alexander McQueen "Fall 2011"

6. New York Times: Reliving the Best (and Worst) ads of 2011

The top ad that made Jenny send a body double to the block: Fiat "My World"

7. The Daily Caller: Top ten most absurd political campaign ads

The top ad that inadvertently doubles as an anti-smoking PSA: Herman Cain "Now is the time for action!"

8. AdAge: 2011’s Best Christmas Holiday Ads

The best ad that makes your thankful there's only one Black Friday a year: Best Buy "Black Friday Bruce"

9. The Counsumerist: Worst Ad in America

The top ad that makes you go "ew": Luv's "Poop There it Is"

10. AdFreak: 30 Freakiest Ads of 2011

The most unintentionally freaky (we think?) ad: LogOff.org "Mommy Facebook Song"

11. TheNextWeb: TNW’s Top 10 Superbowl Ads for 2011

The top Eminem ad that wasn't that awesome Chrysler spot: "Eminem: That's Why I Don't Do Commercials"

12. Time: Top 10 of Everything – Top 10 TV Ads

The top ad to accidentally distract you with anachronistic t-shirts: NFL "Best Fans Ever"

Can’t get enough best-of action? Check out the Best Blogads of 2011.

Chrysler’s Born of Fire ad, starring rapper Eminem, was an instant hit with car and hip-hop enthusiasts a like. The new 300 features speakers from Beats by Dre, lending even more hip-hop cred to Chrysler, and the commercial for it, which premiered during the NBA Finals, stars Eminem’s mentor and label-mate Dr. Dre.

Chrysler, the smallest of the Big Three, may be carving out its own niche with hip-hop aficionados. After Eminem spot premiered in February, the automaker had its best monthly sales total in three years.

If you’re too slow to outrun a zombie, our app can help!

Is 2011 the year that zombies went commercial or what? Zombies are so prevalent in pop culture that you could say they’ve jumped the shark at this point. But not before eating the shark’s brains.

Here are 18 ads from this year starring the undead. As you can see, zombies are the new sex, in terms of advertising strange things.

1. Yoga Outreach

(via)

2. Toshiba Satellite

(via)

3. Sears

(via)

4. Westlake Ace Hardware

(via)

5. SportsTrackLive

6. The CDC

(via)

7. FedEx

(via)

8. 2012 Honda Civic

(via)

9. Mike’s Hard Lemonade

(via)

10. Phones 4 U

(via)

11. Axe

(via)

12. Comedy Central: Ugly Americans

(via)

13. Getafe Club de Fútbol (NSFW)

(via)

14. 13th Street (German Horror Channel)

(via)

15. Call of Duty: Black Ops Rezurrection

(via)

16. Miller Library at McPherson College

(via)

17. Converse

(via)

18. vodacom

(via)

19. DC Shoes

(via)

The Stars of the DSRL

Are you familiar with the DSRL? It’s a marketing team of superstar athletes, comprised of Venus Williams, Eli Manning, Shaquille O’Neal, and Apollo Ohno. And what are they selling? Not Gatorade. Not athletic gear. Not even shoes. They’re selling Oreos. And they can lick the icing out of an Oreo cookie faster than you can.

Here are four food campaigns that dare you to eat. A lot.

1. Nabisco: Triple Double Oreo

Yo dawg, we heard you liked Oreos, so we put an Oreo in your Oreo so you can eat an Oreo while you eat your Oreo.

The Challenge: You’ve licked all of the sugar cream from a Double Stuf, and you’re ready for the next challenge! “Are you game?”

Calories: 100 – per cookie!

2. Burger King: BK Stacker

This “epic” burger is more than just a burger. It’s a really, really big burger.

The Challenge: You’re brave if you can eat  the double stacker, but why stop there? This “ballsy” poster thinks you can do better. (Seriously, ballsy?)

Calories: 1,000 for the Quad, which is no longer on the menu, but we hear you can still order it.

3. Taco Bell: Volcano Nachos

Some call it benign masochism. It’s the pleasure we get from eating ridiculously hot things, and it’s unique to humans.

The Challenge: These nachos are only for the brave. And if you’re brave enough to eat them, you too might end up sounding like Sam Elliott. Sometimes you eat the nachos, and sometimes, well, the nachos eat you.

Calories: 980, perfect for Fourthmeal!

4. KFC: Double Down

You’re the man, now, Colonel!

The Challenge: Still eating those puny chicken sandwiches? You know, the ones with buns! Man up, let the voice change you’ve been putting off happen, and grab some fried chicken-bread.

Calories: 610. (Grams of fat: 37). Hey, not too bad. Unless you dare to make it a combo!