The "40-Minute Blog Break"

--About 35 million workers--one in four people in the labor force--visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them--


Bad for Employers: Good for Marketers
According to Ad Age, the daily employed are becoming slackers at work and reading blogs for about 40 minutes per day. I'm a big fan of Ad Age and Brad Johnson, but I'm not sure: does Ad Age think this is a bad thing for marketers? Whose side are they on, anyway?

Goodbye Watercooler: Hello Blog
I remember back when I worked at Winstar Interactive Media in 2000. We came up with a term back then called the "DDD" - or the "Digital Daytime Demographic." This demographic of folks who were trapped at work were an obvious target of a lot of advertisers (so we therefore pitched advertisers these types of "DDD" people - no, not "ADD" - who visited the web properties we repped). And, they flocked to the idea. Now in 2005, it's gotten even worse, thanks? to blogs. (Remember, I'm a marketer.)

Instead of talking to Mike in IT or Jennifer in Finance, people are blogging away with a key circle of people online who have the same likes and interests. Bosses accept some screwing off as a cost of doing business, and blogging may be one of them, "but at the end of the day," reports AdAge, "more blogging means less working," says Jonathan Gibs, senior research manager at Nielsen/NetRatings.

Achtung Advertisers
More blogging means less working....and more attention capturing opportunities for marketers. Sad, but true. Blogging is easy, fun, free and intellectually stimulating. It doesn't just entail reading; it also involves writing and interacting. It's like online gaming in a way. A hobby. It's addicting. And Ad Age’s analysis of this new national pastime indicates that:

• Work time spent reading and posting to blogs this year will consume 2.2% of U.S. labor force hours
• Work time spent at blogs unrelated to work will eat up 1.65% of labor force hours.
• U.S. workers this year will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years (based on a 24-hour day) or 2.3 million work years (based on a typical nearly 40-hour work week) reading blogs unrelated to the job

The "Attention Capturing Industry" Publication

Although the analysis of Ad Age is in-depth and well-deserved in light of the over-hyped image of blogging in the media the past year, Ad Age's coverage of blogging (in their recent Brad Johnson article) puts blogging in a wasteful light for employers and seemingly reprimands and scolds the blogging industry's existence. But, it should be noted, via the data Ad Age provides to both advertisers and PR professionals alike, that these little media properties [blogs] should be taken seriously in terms of capturing people's attention.

Give Credit Where Credit Is Due: To The Bloggers

Capturing people's attention is what Ad Age as a media property usually covers. Since when is Ad Age a voice of concerned corporate HR departments with all these figures and statistics? Ad Age, instead covers, and should take the angle of, the successes of the attention capturing industry. Blogs are successfully capturing people's attention, for sure. So, although it is indeed good to hear a dissenting voice about blogging, maybe Ad Age should instead be applauding blogs for their attention capturing capabilities via the data they published, rather than seemingly reprimanding them for it.

In terms of providing new marketing avenues it may now in 2005 be "Big Media, Little Blogosphere" as Business Week reported that blogs are just getting started as ad platforms, but Ad Age should give credit where credit is due: to the bloggers.