Readers of Gawker Media's rollicking sports site Deadspin found a different kind of post last week. Scrolling through the foibles of sports stars, they came across one detailing a new bacon cheeseburger from Wendy's. The sponsored piece wasn't penned by the brand or its agency, but by Gawker's in-house ad copywriter, and it adhered to blog style rather than that of typical ad copy.

Gawker, Federated Media, Digg and others are lending a hand with brands looking to fit into their environments without being relegated to the sidelines with run-of-the-mill banner ads. The increased leeway these publishers have in crafting messages centers on the belief that they'll resonate better than if an "outsider" -- whether agency or brand -- tried to do it on their own.

In many ways, the publishers are trying to pull off the same trick as magazines such as Vogue or Wired: making ads a seamless part of the content experience. The difference, publishers say, is that crafting a print ad that adheres to the style and tone of a magazine is easier for an agency to do than getting the vibe of a tight-knit community down.

"The tool set for marketers is beginning to look the same as publishers'," said Pete Spande, svp of sales at FM, noting advertisers now need to create content people elect to consume rather than interrupt them. "That hasn't been the case in advertising to this point."

FM, which represents several well-known blogs and social media sites, dabbled in sponsored posts in recent years. When Virgin America, for instance, wanted to reach design-conscious consumers -- by emphasizing the features that differentiate it from low-cost competitors like Southwest -- FM crafted a sponsored post for Apartment Therapy in February. It extolled the soft lighting of Virgin planes and plush leather seats in the smart tone of other posts on the site.
 
"We're having the brand speak to the community in a sponsored post," said Spande. "Our team is helping the brand team [speak in a way] that's appropriate to the tone and grammar of the site."

The same rationale is deployed at Thrillist, a lifestyle e-mail publication for affluent young males. It crafts advertising e-mails for clients like Gillette and JetBlue. Agencies don't have the right insight to the Thrillist audience, said Ben Lerer, the company's CEO, but can direct the creative to stay true to the brand.

"Their brand equity is safe," he said. "We [won't] do anything they're not comfortable with, but if they let us play around a bit, we can take a message that's working and tweak it so it speaks directly to our guys."

More often than not, the publisher, rather than the advertiser or agency, has a better idea of what will connect. HBO, for instance, contracted Gawker to write sponsored posts and a blog for its True Blood campaign because "they know the voice" as the audience is the same as the Web site's, said Steve Wax, managing partner at marketing agency Campfire.



Additionally, agencies, hit hard by the recession, don't have the personnel in many cases to craft messages for discrete communities. That means some publishers are hiring copywriters familiar with the style of the sites and immersed in the communities. As part of its Digg Ads -- which appear in the same style as stories submitted to the social news site -- Digg has staffers who rewrite headlines and deck copy for advertisers, in some cases creating it themselves.

"You now need to write headlines worth sharing," said Chas Edwards, chief revenue officer at Digg. While some advertisers and agencies do well in this area, he noted, "other marketers are less familiar with the grammar of Digg."

Hiring a dedicated copywriting team can help avoid the blurring of the lines between editorial and advertising, these execs say. FM learned this the hard way. A year ago, it ran a program with its bloggers using the "People ready" theme of a Microsoft campaign that ran into opposition with some bloggers who regretted their participation because they felt the program was unethical. Gawker's campaign for True Blood also met with controversy as some, including a few Gawker editors, said it violated journalistic ethics, even though the posts and True Blood blog were written by the marketing department.
 
Thrillist, on the other hand, relies on its regular editorial staff to write advertiser e-mails, although a core group of three tend to do most of them because they're well versed in the back-and-forth needed with the brands, Lerer said.

The risk for some sites is to stray into the area of paid product reviews, Spande said, although the Internet tends to self-correct.

"Marketers go where there's performance," he said. "If it's a bad site experience, it won't perform."

The question that remains to be answered is whether fitting the tone improves performance. Spande said FM hopes to research whether such posts increase affinity for the brand. Chris Batty, vp, sales at Gawker, said the bar for many advertisers was to achieve more views for their posts than the editorial posts on the page. He pointed out that a sponsored post on Gizmodo that promoted the movie District 9 by highlighting the "Arc gun" used to keep alien creatures at bay in the movie got about 30,000 views. Over half of Gawker ad campaigns now include a sponsored post element, Batty said.

"I know that's what's driving all the lift," he said. "That's where all the reader attention is, not ads in the margin."

See also: "Digg Plots Ad Network"