Marketer, Marketer, where have you been?

There is much dis­cus­sion about Rag­ing­Cow, a new site cre­ated to mar­ket a new Dr. Pep­per soft drink. The funny thing is that some say it won’t work but the site is already get­ting free pub­lic­ity from blog­gers all over. I didn’t know about the drink prior to see­ing it on Blogdex so that makes me a suc­cess­ful tar­get (not that I will touch the stuff, I don’t drink milk). Anil has a good point that things are not going to get any eas­ier. To that extent, I’d like to intro­duce a mod­est pro­posal for mark­ing up your site: the full dis­clo­sure xml feed.

Here’s how it works:
First, there’s an XML def­i­n­i­tion to say this is an XML feed:

This is fol­lowed by the tag which says this is my full dis­clo­sure feed.

Generic infor­ma­tion sim­i­lar to an RSS feed includes the weblog title, weblog URL, the RSS URL (this is impor­tant because some peo­ple may only read a site through an RSS reader), the type of site (this can be either per­sonal (for a per­sonal site), cor­po­rate (for a site run by the cor­po­ra­tion push­ing the prod­uct), or mar­ket­ing (for mar­ket­ing agen­cies, adver­tis­ing agen­cies, pub­lic rela­tions com­pa­nies, and other out­side agen­cies pro­mot­ing a prod­uct on behalf of a client), and a con­tact part (this can either be an email address or the URL of a web form to con­tact the per­son or company).

We then go into the sec­tion For every type of ad, we include a „ , and . Let me go into more details on this:

Type

: There are a num­ber of ways in which a mar­ket­ing place­ment can appear. It can be through the form of a ban­ner, a but­ton, a pop-up ad, a text-ad (sim­i­lar to Google tex­tads or metafilter’s), a links (within a blogroll, or nav­i­ga­tion area, or an entry. If you want to make it clear, you might want to include all of them, or you can pick and choose which ones you will include.

Com­pen­sa­tion

: This cov­ers what kind of com­pen­sa­tion you received. It can be none (if you just want to say we don’t run this type of ad), good­will (if you think you’re going to get good karma out of it), cash (the hard stuff), prod­uct (if you got a free prod­uct out of it) or link (for exam­ple if you link to a friend and they link back to you).

Value

: This is a free form field where you can list what is the value of the goods, ser­vices, money you received. Some of it could be free traf­fic, for example.

Entry

: This one is in the off-chance that one day, you did decide to do a one-off deal on a par­tic­u­lar entry or if you want to sec­tion off par­tic­u­lar types of mar­ket­ing to a par­tic­u­lar sec­tion. It can be all (for all entries), none (for no entries at all) or a URL (which would be the perma­link of the par­tic­u­lar entry this applies to).

That’s about it. I just mocked it up in a few min­utes so I expect a lot more flesh­ing out to hap­pen. In that attempt, I invoke the Lazy­Web to dis­cuss further.