That’s Lucia in discussions with a sales guy from WBUR. I bet that’s the wrong term for the role. Sorry ‘BUR!

Anyway, they are sitting there in the first stage of discussions/ negotiations regarding advertising (I’m sorry, “Sponsorship”) of WBUR programming.

Why is Clover advertising? We’re working hard on this whole CSA project. I’m hopeful it’s the beginning of something that will have a massive impact on small farms and good eating everywhere. We’re afraid a lot of the people we’d like to turn onto our CSA program may not even know what we mean when we say CSA. So we’re taking a small portion of every CSA and developing an advertising budget to promote the CSA program.

Now you may know that Clover has exactly zero experience with advertising. Thankfully I used to work for companies that spent a lot on advertising, and I used to help them figure out how to get more out of those dollars. So I’m dusting off the cobwebs and we’re trying to make these dollars go as far as possible.

And we’re smack in the middle of the reality that is re-shapping the ad landscape. We’re having trouble justifying the cost of advertising through traditional media vs. advertising via Facebook and Google. For $2,000 I can buy a lot of adwords from Google. That means I choose some phrases (e.g., “Boston CSA”) and when somebody searches for that phrase they will see my ad in the “sponsored results” portion of their page. I may pay $0.50 for each customer who clicks on my ad. For radio we’re talking $2,000 for say 5 spots mentioning Clover for 10-15 seconds. I would need to expect each of those 15 second bursts generates something like 800 listeners who pull out their computer or phone and look us up. ($2,000/ $0.50 = 4,000 equivalent; 4,000/5 spots = 800/ spot.) It’s pretty hard for me to believe that would work.

That said, we’re working hard on a distributed campaign. We’ll share more details as we get closer to launching the first placements. We’re thinking we’re going to ask you all to help us decide on the best “copy” and “creative” — those are ad-world terms : )