Question for forum owners about types of ads you're willing to accept

[markp_2000]

My wife works for an ad agency, and outside that, she owns/operates a big-board forum for couponers. She doesn't have a VB.org account - we just use mine for the site, but here's a question she'd like to pose to other forum owners, particularly those in the game forum communities. Any feedback anyone might have (game community or not) she'd love to have today as her client meeting is this afternoon.


Thanks!

Mark


I'm working on a project where we're hoping to hook up with community owners who can help "evangelize" a contest we're doing for our client, a well-known tech company who's doing a developer's contest this spring.

So my question for other admins is, if an agency or advertiser came to you with the request that they'd do an ad/donation to your community in return for you as the site owner posting details of the promotion and links for where your members could enter, would you do it?

And if so, for how much? What level of support would you put against it? If they were willing to give you some promo dollars you could put into your community in the form of an internal contest you hold linked to their contest, would that sweeten the pot? IE, we give you $500 you can use internally to host a contest for your members who enter the advertiser's contest, and you use those dollars to help get out the vote and create some prizes if you have members enter, and if you have multiple members enter, even if they don't win the advertiser's contest, the top entrant from your site, you could use those dollars to give them a site-level prize.

If you offer a site email newsletter, or can push email through to your members through your forum software, would you be willing to use that as a tactic as well to support the advertiser?

Basically, I think forums are neglected in the ad opportunities, with advertisers tending to go with bloggers, and so I have a real opportunity to test this in the video game developer community, but if the test goes well, I'll write/publish a case study with the results to submit to places like Advertising Age magazine, etc. on the values of advertising in forum communities.

So, I'd love some feedback on this. We're in front of the client on Monday and the proposal is semi-baked at this point, and I have a list of gamedev sites I'd like to connect with (although if you happen to have a site dedicated to PC gaming, I'd be interested in chatting with you too).

TIA!!!