The Rise of the Flog

Flog (Merriam-Webster):
1 a: to beat with or as if with a rod or whip b: to criticize harshly
2: to force or urge into action

Flog (Online Marketing):
1. Fake blog
2. First-person advertorial phrased in a way that makes it look like an authentic story, presented in a format similar in look and function to blogs

The Rise and Beginning of the Fall
Beginning in Q3 2008, a new form of advertising started to take hold. Nothing about the sites looked remarkable. Nothing about the sites would suggest the level of revenue they would generate - individuals spending $60,000 / day and single companies earning north of $30,000,000 monthly. And, nothing about them would indicate that by the end of January 2009 (less than six months since their appearance) upwards of 70,000 people each day would enter their credit card information for products that readers of this blog would presume no one would purchase  from never before heard of companies offering - acai, government grants, wrinkle cream, and google work from home offers to name a few, or as those offering them would prefer to describe it - customer acquisition for the health and beauty industry and financial services vertical.

As quickly as they have ascended, the flogs are poised for an equally impressive fall from prominence. The performance marketing industry has a well-earned reputation for pushing the limits, as evidenced by the attention it drew thanks to the often aggressive and misleading messaging that accompanied the mobile subscription marketing sector of ringtones and more recently the "iq quiz" programs. That sector has taught those us following the performance marketing space what will most likely happen with the flogs. The most surprising thing so far regarding flog advertising, or flogvertising as it is known among the industry players, is the intensity and (lack of) duration of the life cycle. Ringtones had a solid two years before experiencing headwinds, and if we include mobile subscription marketing as a whole, it still very much thrives despite those headwinds. One day, if ever there are going to be case studies on the dynamics of a marketing strategy online, the rise and fall of flogs and flogvertising will be it. 

So why is a sector that many have yet to hear of already in decline? There are a few main factors, and it doesn't have to do with the sophistication of the online audience. It has everything to do with the uncontrolled aggressiveness of the marketers which triggered the following:
1) Swifter sanctions by those controlling traffic
2) A more quickly developed library of complaints that gained media and legal attention much quicker

That aggressiveness which allowed those participating to scale goes hand in hand with an endemic short term thinking that plagues much of the performance marketing sector, in this case what we might call the high performance sector. The quick money and lack of barriers to entry creates a gold rush mentality that with the creation of each new marketing method finds the miners tapping out the vein quicker and quicker. The worst transgression? Flogs aren't that bad; or, put another way, they are so much closer than it might seem to being a legitimate and viable marketing method (like infomercials and advertorials). Seeing them ruined and the wake they leave behind (hurting all blogs, all performance marketing, continuity programs, etc.) is painful for those who care and those who see how the high performance sector will probably earn 20% or less of the potential lifetime value had some notion of long-term thinking and restraint been employed.

Problem Solved
Flogs took off for a reason, and it has very little to do with the weakness in online advertising; although, that did help them scale. Flogs solved the click to sale challenge that unbranded, low intent products faced. Ask anyone in the ad network business, and there is a reason you don't see many "Click Here to Buy" ads. They simply don't work. Let's look at an example. Pretend the ad says, "You can lose 20lbs in 1 month." And takes you here:

 

It has the testimonials, the media mentions, all the elements that should make it convert. But this ad could not run on display or scale on paid search no matter how well designed the creative or enticing the copy. 

The evolution of the flog began with ads like this -

This ad as direct ad to a landing page like the above which worked well, but not in the scale we saw when it transformed to the flog. That affiliates could spend 15k per day on Facebook though, showed the potential. That was until Facebook no longer allowed images of Oprah or direct to Acai berry ads. Earlier landing pages took a much more aggressive route in trying to connect popular media with the landing page - implying an almost endorsement when none existed.

Mechanics of the Flog
After seeing a couple of flogs, you will start to spot them and their ads easily. We'll stick with the originators of the flog, diet / acai for now. Here are some of the ads.

 

 

Above are some of the more recent ads, most all of which run on display and/or non-Google contextual networks (but not on Facebook).

The flog landing pages come in all shapes in sizes, from the more professionally done to the perhaps intentionally horribly designed. For more detail, see my article on DMConfidential on the Anatomy of a Flog. Pasted below is a fairly common example of what might be considered an upscale diet flog. Over the past few months, I've collected perhaps 50 such sites, with many no longer in existence. They have been in the past simply too easy to put up (and take down) with the astute observer noticing that the same people seem to appear in multiple sites. (See Wafflesatnoon - List of sites and List of personalities for more.)

The Keys to Success
Compare the site above to the landing pages shown earlier, and the flog's power starts to become clear. There are two factors at play with the above site. The first is its power as a mega-jump page. Let's run through a hypothetical example. Everything about the above works better.

• CTR on ads - Flogs will be at least double, a huge starting advantage
• CVR on landing page - A straight click to the original Acai page might generate at best a 2% conversion rate. The CVR on that Acai page after a flog lander will be 4% to 6%

Putting it together we have - Non flog -> 1,000,000 impressions -> .10% CTR -> 100 clicks -> 2 sales
Flog -> 1,000,000 impressions -> .20% CTR -> 200 clicks to Flog lander -> 30% CTR on Flog lander -> 60 clicks to Acai -> 2.4 to 3.6 sales.

Those numbers make the contest seem closer than it ends up being. That is until the Q4 flog innovation comes into play - the multiple product endorsements.

A normal landing page gets one chance to pitch its one product. Not the flogs. They tell a two product story, which makes the math closer to this:

Flog -> 1,000,000 impressions -> .20% CTR -> 200 clicks to Flog lander -> 30% CTR on Flog lander -> 60 clicks to Acai -> 2.4 to 3.6 sales
+
20% CTR to Ad 2 -> 40 clicks -> 3% CVR -> 1.2 sales.
Combined you have at least double the performance of the non-flog ad.
That spread, which when applied to other areas, e.g. government grants, became even greater than 2x.

The Good. The Bad. The Shameful.
Besides being tales of fiction that violate the accepted rules for advertising, some of the real violations come from unnapproved brand / celebrity usage. You will see (or would have seen) flogs with names like:

Flat Belly? Opr.ahs Rule:

You can lose over 10lbs a week by following 1 rule like Op.rah did!
Oprah-Diet-Trial.com

Orprah's Flat Belly Rule:

Lose more than 10lbs every week by simply obeying Orprah's 1 rule.
Oprah-Diet-Free.com

The Rachael Ray Diet
I followed Rachael Ray's advice and
lost over 22 pounds in one month!
www.MollysWeightLost.com

The Rachael Ray Diet
I followed Rachael Ray's advice and
lost over 32 pounds in one month!
www.NadiasWeightLoss.com

Jennifer Aniston Diet

I lost 30 lbs by following the same
1 diet rule Jennifer Aniston uses.
www.celebritydietblog.net

Along with the aforementioned laziness that has the same site re-using the same images. (See Wafflesatnoon's List of personalities)

JayWeintraub.com Reader's Special - Government Grant Flog Example!!!

Most recent landing page (still available) - post Facebook slap, Post Google slap, and post FTC inquiry

New Trend - Disclosure (Sort of)
Look at the bottom of many of the more original flogs, and you will find a) nothing, or b) a disclaimer that tries to limit their liability from use of the oprah, Rachel Ray, Dr. Oz, etc. images. It will read something like

All trademarks on this web site whether registered or not, are the property of their respective owners. The authors of this web site are not sponsored by or affiliated with any of the third-party trade mark or third-party registered trade mark owners, and make no representations about them, their owners, their products or services.

Scroll to the bottom of the above page, and you will see something new. A fairly detailed disclosure.

Please keep in mind that I got the grant trials for free, but there is a shipping fee of $2.95 and this advertiser has terms regarding continued billing after trial expires if you do not cancel. This advertiser requires the trial to be canceled within 7 days of the trial period. This grant kit I recommend retails for $68.13. If you enjoy the products, simply do nothing. You will be billed at a discounted price of $68.13 at the end of the free trial period. By signing up YOU UNDERSTAND THAT THIS CONSUMER TRANSACTION INVOLVES A NEGATIVE OPTION AND THAT YOU MAY BE LIABLE FOR PAYMENT OF FUTURE GOODS AND SERVICES, UNDER THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT, IF YOU FAIL TO NOTIFY THE SUPPLIER NOT TO SUPPLY THE GOODS OR SERVICES DESCRIBED. Also, this is a general information site to help you make informed decisions. The stories you read on this site and affiliated sites are 100% fiction. If you have further interest in receiving a government grant I recommend visiting grants.gov. Thanks and good luck with filling your first application

The Future
Even if flog volume has declined since its peak, we have yet to see the end of the flog. Legal proceedings have yet to truly begin nor fines levied. They won't go away, but as I fear, they have missed their chance to reach their potential while also managing to yet again give high performance marketing a black eye. There is a real distinction between this type of performance-based marketing and the kind that those with a vested interest in the space perform; unfortunately, in the eyes of Google and others, the two have become closely related. These false positives who will find themselves ensnared in the net preventing them from advertising are a small price to pay for Google but a big price to pay for the online customer acquisition industry. Unfortunately, how can we expect a 23 year old who is all of the sudden making six figures monthly to truly understand and care what the ramifications of their actions will be. When it's time for them to get punished, they will have shut down their site and the cpa network who worked with them will shoulder the burden because they have an office a legislative entity can visit.

Further Reading - In the Press
Center for Science in the Public Interest - Acai warning which inspired
CNN.com

ABC News

P.S. Brian, I know I didn't do a decent job of spell-checking or fixing grammatical errors. 

Comments

[John DeMayo]

Well said. A few notes:

The flog's increase in (initial/ad) CTR are often due to false/misleading claims, that the advertiser can't make directly (by definition of false/misleading).

Increase on CVR/landing page is often much greater then you reference (via false/misleading claims, and the added pre-qualification almost any intermediary page creates).

----
Thanks, John!

[Mark R]

My main issues with flogs, or more so the companies that allow flogs (such as Google and ValueClick) is the fact that the same company is allowed to create hundreds of fake companies and as a publisher you need to continually check and ban them every day if you don't want them to appear on your website.

For example, in the past if I saw an ad on my website I would ban it Google Adsense, and ValueClick and ask to exclude all future ads from that company. It was easy and I was able to ensure that my users did not fall victim to any ads which I considered to be scams. Now, every day the same company sets up new accounts with Google and ValueClick and I need to check every day to ban them. This should not be tolerated in any way by Google or ValueClick and the fact that they allow this has completely changed my view of both companies.

[John Henderson]

Personally, I hate flogs with a passion... Granted I understand why they are set up the way that they are, but the lack of "ethics" is astounding. I know that almost every ad can toe the line of what is right and wrong, but every one of these flogs, are just blatent lies.

As somone who has created a simple standard for personal ethics (very minimal, don't lie, don't cheat people out of money) I can tolerate quite a bit without even flinching.

But these are just crazy. When I say my first one, I thought to myself: "please don't become a standard" and I am extremely glad that there has been backlash against them.

The baseline for being successful shouldn't just be who can lie the best with the prettiest pictures.

PS. I just stumbled upon this blog very recently and I love it. Thanks for some amazing stuff

[Paul Schlegel]

I've been tracking the flogs for fake grant offers and "make money posting links on Google" sites for about 4 months now. I'm up to over 1000 and I typically find 10 to 20 new ones every day, so I don't really see the flogs in that market falling off.

One of the big problems I see is that the affiliate networks typically are not made the target of prosecutions - and they are the ones who are the biggest means of getting the hidden negative option offers promoted by the flogs distributed. Second-best to go after would be the affiliates themselves.

But of course, it's the companies that own the offers that are typically the sole objects of Federal and State charges.

There seem to be two problems there:

1) I've been told that the FTC sometimes gives a company a "clean up" period (I haven't verified that). If that's true, then it's simple enough for someone to "comply" through their existing company, while setting up a totally different company with different officers and set up a new deceptive offer. I've certainly seen that happen on several occasions.

2) By not going after the networks, the affiliate networks have no incentive to NOT run the offers as those offers are huge money makers for them.

There are also much better ways to estimate the impact to consumers than just looking at the number of complaints coming through the various complaint systems such as IC3, FTC, etc.

Those numbers are traditionally low and they can't be extrapolated to a larger number, because they aren't based on a true random sample.

Meanwhile, sites like Compete, Quantcast, and now even Alexa it seems have become more accurate in their traffic estimates.

So it's a simple matter to acquire or estimate conversion rates on an offer and estimate retention rates conservatively to come up with some often staggering numbers regarding cost to consumers.

[Herbert Gordon]

Hi Jay,

This was a very interesting post. I had never heard of the term flog before reading your blog and so I leaned some very valuable information.

My sister as a matter of fact was taken for $150.00 from a company promoting [flogvertiser} a new teeth whitener. She could try it (sample)and just pay shipping cost of $2.95. She ordered it and two months later she found out they had charged her credit card $170.00 for the continued use of the product. She was furious.

I called the people involved. They were located in India somewhere and after almost an hour of being bounced around from assistant to supervisor to supervisors manager to being disconnected and having to call back then speaking to a manager then a regional director, etc., who all tried to explain that it said in the ad she had 30 days to cancel he the regional director finally agreed to give back a partial payment of $60.00.

But what was also unbelieveable to me was the regional director was willing to allow my sister to keep her subscription of the product for only $20.00 per mo. The same product that they had billed her $85.00 per month for. Go figure that one out.

After reading this article I realize I have seen these flogs or flogvertisers all over and at least somewhere every day. I just didn't know that's what they were.

Anyway, folks those Teeth Whitener Ads are also Flogs.

I'm gonna call my sister today and tell her she was FLOGGED. LOL.

Thanks for a great article and I do mean Great Article.

[Noah Robinson]

Bring on the regulators.

I'm surprised that Ben Edelman hasn't been all over this.

[Finch]

Hey dude

Awesome post. I've linked to you from my site: http://finchsells.com/2009/06/04/to-flog-or-not-to-flog/

Personally, I think the flog can be a good method of promotion for just about anything - it doesn't have to be the scammy trial offers that give it a bad rep. But, of course, there are people who will continue to abuse the concept and push it in to false advertising waters.

Anyway, excellent blog.

[jl]

These types of promotions are now also shifting to using fake answer sites to trick people as well.

http://www.answerbankpro.com/health/diet-and-fitness/advice-needed-on-acai-berry-colon-cleanse-diet/

[Raief]

Good post.

Now with the new FTC guidelines it will be easier for the scam flogs to be fined and prosecuted. If they publish testimonials and earnings claims they will have to be able to offer corroborative proof from members.

The Earnings and Income Disclaimers that they post will not negate the claims made on the flogs or the splash pages.

I have seen two versions this week that have shortened their trial periods from 7 days to 1 and 3 days. If a subscriber does not cancel within these time frames they will be automatically be charged the monthly fees that are buried in their Terms and Conditions.

Here is one of these active scam sites: news3insider.com/finance/google-hiring-you.html.

Note that some of the wording contained on the flog:

"Google has now officially released their new "work from home" system out to the public. There will be thousand of spots available that are expected to go very soon in the next few days.

The way this works is very simple, Google says.

First you will need to apply for their work from home kits. Google has release a limited amount of kits, all distributed through local websites in your area, which will cost $2 of shipping and handling to the public."

This is pure out and out fraud. Google does not sell any kits.

The guidelines go into effect in December, but the FTC is making note of scam sites that are continuing with these false assertions and claims.

[Ryan]

I was flogged.

The google work from home got me for $1.97
I went into my profile and it now does not let me.

It's coming from http://freeblogkit.com
They are the one's who charge the card, I have luckily not been charged again...

I need to make sure they don't charge it...I guess if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is...

However, I did follow some bloggers who are excited about this "biz opportunity" and supposedly have made money! But it sounds like only by ripping people off!

Anyway, great blog and I hope someone can send me some info on how to not keep getting ripped off and how to fight this.
Please contact me on twitter @RyanWCarlson

Thanks!
Ryan