How we wanted to "troll" Artemy Lebedev, and got him "Respect" and the post in LJ

Artemy Lebedev's blog is visited daily by about 100 thousand users. Every week on Mondays, the rubric “300 by 300” was invented on the site - advertisers send advertising modules to Lebedev with links, and he publishes them for money. A few months ago, as part of our marketing activities, we decided to place our banner there. 3 months after the payment, the banner appeared in a “cozy zherzhechka”, but this did not bring us any results: there was little traffic, but not a single application followed. Before posting there - we read a lot of enthusiastic reviews from advertisers on the relevant pages of his LiveJournal, but in reality (at least for us) everything was not so rosy. We wondered - is something wrong with our banner, offer, website, or is it the reason for the wrong target audience or bad advertising platform as such? And we decided to check it out.

To do this, we went through all the banners that have ever been placed under the heading "300 to 300" (since April 2014), and thus collected an email database, which had 234 addresses. An interesting point - when navigating through banners, we found at least several sites that have already ceased to exist in a year. Our main competence is to collect reviews through triggered email newsletters, so it was not a big deal using our own Mneniya.Pro service to send a personal invitation to each advertiser by e-mail to leave a review about the placement of the banner on Artemy Lebedev’s blog.

How we collected feedback from Advertisers Themes

For the most part, people are reluctant to write reviews, but human nature is such that people like to give advice to help others - this is what we “pressed.” The goal was to collect as many advertiser views as possible for analysis. For this, the title of the letters “About your banner 300 x 300” was chosen, and we decided to use the name of the blog “tema.livejournal.com” as the name of the sender. If we mentioned in the text of the letter that each review would fall into LJ Topics (as it turned out later), I’m sure it would significantly increase the responsiveness, but we could not give such guarantees, so the standard wording of the recall call was chosen. In the cap, we added a photo of Artemia to enhance the effect. Below is an example of how a request for review looked, which was personally sent to each Advertiser of the Theme:
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When you click on the “Leave feedback” button, a person got on a form on our server, where it was possible to describe the advantages and disadvantages of the publication in expanded form, leave an additional comment, evaluate the advertising campaign on a 5-point scale, and also asked to answer “Yes / No "To the question" Do you recommend this to other advertisers? "



We did the newsletter in stages for 3 days. A total of 234 letters were sent, 223 of which reached the addressee. A few days managed to collect and count the results. As a result, every seventh advertiser left his review:



And now the most interesting - the number of positive and negative reviews was distributed approximately equally. On the graph below, negative feedback is marked in red, and positive feedback in green:



Some advertisers praised Theme's advertising on LiveJournal and said how many applications were collected after the banner was published, while others, on the contrary, expressed their dissatisfaction and said that the site was bad, Central Asia was inappropriate and did not recommend hosting Lebedev, despite the huge traffic in his blog.

How Lebedev responded to the feedback collected

So, we received reviews for our own analysis, as we wanted. After analyzing, we came to the conclusion that most likely the problem of the failure of our advertising campaign for Theme, like many other advertisers, in an incorrectly chosen Central Asia - all the same, its platform is more suitable for B2C projects.

However, we did not dwell on this, because it's silly to have such information and not try to spread it. The first thing that occurred to us was to write a letter to Lebedev, show the results and offer to publish not only positive, but also negative feedback from advertisers in LJ. However, to be honest, we were very skeptical about this venture - he is unlikely to publish reviews of dissatisfied customers on his site. At best, simply ignore our letter. We decided to do the following: send as is, and then we will look at the circumstances - if the answer is not followed, we will try to “troll” Artemiy in the comments of his blog, spreading the information that he deliberately hides negative customer reviews, publishing only positive ones, we have evidence. The audience in his comments collected a very specific and trolling there is considered the norm, so our comments should have attracted attention.

Without counting on feedback, we sent a letter to Lebedev with collected feedback, and what was our surprise when, after a few minutes, he replied:



Holding our breath, we waited for what would happen next. And then the most interesting thing happened and what we did not expect at all - after a while Artemy Lebedev Studio Store Manager contacted us and asked how our service could be useful for their website. Incredibly, Tyome was so pleased with the work we did that he thought it necessary to advise his employee to talk with us about collecting feedback about the studio's products! We immediately began discussing the technical details with the store manager, and the next day an extensive post appeared in the “cozy zhezheshechka”, where Lebedev published all the reviews we collected from his advertisers, mentioning us: “The reviews were collected by the service mneniya.pro . The guys have done their best, for which they respect. ”

What we finally brought this idea

Thanks to this publication, our site’s traffic has grown 4 times and immediately received several interesting offers of cooperation, including applications to connect to the service.



Initially, when the idea to collect reviews for Lebedev arose, we did not think about this effect. Now, we not only lit up for free in front of his vast audience, but also in the process of connecting to our service the online store of his studio at his own tip, although we ourselves repeatedly tried to contact them, filling up with commercial offers that had never followed. answer.

Summing up this story, I can highlight 2 insights:

• If your product can solve the problem of one of the leaders of opinions - it would be an excellent strategy to first benefit from it, and then demonstrate it, but not vice versa. If we originally wrote to Tema, they say if you want to collect feedback using our service, I think there would be no answer. Since we initiated this process ourselves and really did a lot of work, the probability of being noticed by him turned out to be much higher.
• Do not be skeptical of seemingly unrealistic ventures. If we didn’t write directly to Lebedev, we would immediately “troll” him in the comments — obviously, that would be pointless. In turn, Lebedev once again emphasized his professionalism, publishing in his LiveJournal reviews, including dissatisfied advertisers, for which he, too, was “respected”.