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.