FM/Toshiba Battle Royale Is A New Kind Of Marketing, Happens To Be Fun

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federated media battle royale

By David Ponce

Don’t start flailing your arms because this involves sponsors; it’s actually interesting, so please hear me out. For the past few weeks, Federated Media (our advertising partners) and Toshiba have been hosting a new kind of advertising campaign. It’s called FM:Tech Battle Royale and it involves several high-profile sites answering one tech related question a week, and battling for popularity. There’s a couple guys from BoingBoing, Ken Fisher from Ars Technica, a few other sites and of course myself. Each week, the question is read by the ninja from Ask A Ninja and readers get to vote on their favorite answer. I’ll tell you, it’s sort of fun to be battling it out with these guys, even if in the end it doesn’t make much difference who wins. See, whoever leads in the votes doesn’t really get anything special. Only bragging rights, I guess. But this is where I ask all y’all to help me out a little and send a couple votes my way. I’m currently 4th in the rankings, a whisper ahead of Mark Frauenfelder from BoingBoing.

And for the record no one asked me to write this post, and I don’t get paid to write the answers. Toshiba (the sponsor) is running ads on this site (you might have seen them around) and that’s the only form of compensation in this campaign.

I’d also love to hear your thoughts on this thing.

[ FM Battle Royale ]

3 COMMENTS

  1. Fazal–I’m the publisher at Federated Media, and I’d love to hear more about your objection to this “Tech Battle Royale” program. The sponsorship relationship with Toshiba is quite transparent from the start, and David’s post above takes that transparency even further. The program doesn’t affect any editorial content on OhGizmo, and — as far as I can tell — doesn’t sway the editorial voice at OhGizmo. Is your objection just to the idea that authors can acknowledge advertisers on their editorial pages? Or that an author’s content can be licensed for us on a marketer’s site or advertorial project? Thanks for the feedback.

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