It’s just coincidence to see these ads on the site they reference—they’re elsewhere on the Web too. Regardless, it’s interesting to see a company making an appeal based on the opinion of a popular tech blog:

Gizmodo is sort of the big time when it comes to tech and gadget blogs (it’s the most profitable of the Gawker Media blogs) so it makes some sense that Sprint would brag about being well evaluated there. What’s a little surprising is what happens when one clicks on these ads: The user is taken to read more about Sprint’s mobile broadband services in that Gizmodo post. The ads don’t lead back to Sprint’s own site, but to someone else’s blog post.

Sprint is shelling out cash—in part ot Gizmodo itself—to direct traffic to Gizmodo’s positive review of their product. That’s a unique possibility on the Web. An ad on TV or in a Magazine might quote a third party, but it can’t lead viewers or readers directly to that supposedly objective external evaluation. But this case demonstrates that there are novel ways to leverage independent content for advertising on the Web. If these ads aren’t concentrated on sites that tend to link to or be linked to from Gizmodo that’s Sprint’s error. Such a deployment would be easy to map out. That adds the additional layer of being able to target users with appeals to sources of authority they are most likely to be impressed by.

And underneat this all, of course, is the continued mainstreaming of major blogs. How recently did large telecom companies start paying attention to what the blogosphere was saying at all, much less with enough attention and care to leverage it in a campagin?