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"Tumblr has earned much of its popularity in the fashion world, and rightly so. We've even lauded the company for its efforts \u2014 particularly for promoting bloggers as capable fashion reporters in their own right \u2014 and celebrated the way many top fashion houses have taken to the platform.\nBut now individuals from several fashion brands and their agencies \u2014 brands that were among the first and most enthusiastic supporters of the platform and its community \u2014 are speaking out against Tumblr as it closes in on another impressive round of funding, and prepares to send 16 bloggers to a second season of shows, breakfasts and intimate studio tours at their hosts' expense.\nThe complaints began, as Betabeat first discovered, with Jessica Coghan, director of digital marketing at Starworks Group. She publicly blogged her frustration with the sponsorship proposal Tumblr Fashion Director Rich Tong was shopping around to brands ahead of New York Fashion Week, which begins next Thursday.\nAccording to the proposal, Tumblr is asking for upwards of $10,000 for private events with the bloggers, not including the venue and other costs. Sponsorship of Tumbr's NYFW page and tumblr.com/tagged/fashion are priced at $150,000 and $350,000 for the week, respectively. Brands can also be guaranteed product placement in each of the blogs for an unlisted sum.\n\n\n\n\nOne industry rep we spoke to said the sums were \"ridiculous.\" The rep pointed to the $150,000 package in particular, which merits a sponsor a 190x190 banner ad above the fold and the ability to promote their own Tumblr posts on the page's newsfeed. The page is expected to generate 1 million impressions over the course of the week, which equates to an estimated CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of nearly $70.\nFor comparison, the rep told us, a front page takeover of nytimes.com runs at a CPM of about $2 to $3, and the \"most premium\" package from magazine publisher Conde Nast runs just above $30 \u2014 and that includes a great deal more than a tiny banner ad and a few promoted posts.\nThe offline event packages are bad in other ways, our source argued. Why pay Tumblr $10,000 to host the crew of bloggers instead of sending invites directly to the individuals? And similarly, why go through Tumblr for product placement? Doesn't the product placement guarantee seem to compromise the editorial integrity of the individual bloggers, anyways?\nIn her own post, Coghan says \"someone\" (linking to this post about Tong) \"is completely out of their goddamn mind.\" Tumblr, she says, needs to provide brands with an analytics dashboard, no \"flash in a pan fashion week nonsense.\"\nElaborating on Coghan's complaint in a phone interview, one agency representative complained that employees were forced to manually count likes and reblogs. \"It such a waste of our time when it could be easily culled together,\" the rep explains. The agency, like most others, has been forced to depend on Google Analytics for basic traffic metrics, but Google Analytics doesn't provide any insight into Tumblr-specific metrics.\nBut fashion marketers' issues with Tumblr don't end with the lack of an analytics dashboard. In a response post on her personal Tumblr that has since been deleted, Julie Fredrickson, who manages digital and social media at Ann Taylor, voiced her own frustrations as a marketer working with Tumblr:\nI am going to go on record saying that no one at Tumblr reached out to Ann Taylor with a proposal for Fashion Week and we are1)\u00A0the first fashion brand to be on Tumblr (even though we carefully avoid press since this piece as a company)2) have invested MAJOR brand and development dollars into the platform (see ArtSheSaid, OnTumblr) going on for over a year now.3) Actually have the wherewithall and knowledge to be a good sponsor of this as a companyPlease someone who is a grown up at Tumblr listen to the brands that care about you. It isn\u2019t just\u00A0Users First, Brands Second. Hell at this point you are Users First, Brands never. Take a cue from Michael Lazerow\u2019s comments on that post and realize that brands pay the bills when VCs stop.Rich Tong-if you don\u2019t actively pursue these options you are not doing your job. You know that Ann Taylor loves Tumblr, you know that we invest money, and yet you have ignored us. Unless I am mistaken your job is \u201CFashion Director\u201D so act like it.\nFrederickson isn't the first person to suggest that Tumblr plays favorites. I've heard the same from individual bloggers, many of whom have expressed private frustration with Tumblr's seemingly arbitrary selection of Fashion Week attendees, some of whom do little to no coverage of all of the events and shows they're invited to.\nHalf-a-dozen marketers at both agencies and brands have voiced similar problems; some brands get spotlighted, others can't get a return email.\nThe most explicit on-the-record account of this appeared on Raman Kia's blog Thursday. Kia also works at Starworks as  the director of digital and social media marketing and is, not incidentally, married to Coghan.\nHe comes with his own set of complaints about his experience with Tumblr:\nIn the first instance we invited Tumblr to a meeting with one of our clients. I am not in a position to reveal any names but I can assure you that this brand is one of the largest online retailers of luxury fashion globally. The meeting was set to discuss mutually benefitting opportunities. So, it came as a surprise to my client that the person representing Tumblr at this meeting had no idea who my client was. Let me just put this in perspective: This is one of the biggest retailer of luxury fashion in the world (did I already say that?) \u2013 and probably one of the most reputable and prestigious. It\u2019s like saying I am the Director of Automotive but I\u2019ve never heard of BMW or Mercedes!In the second instance, for another highly known fashion retailer, after an event was negotiated and agreed upon with Tumblr and our brand had put time and resources into planning the event, Tumblr simply pulled out and gave the event to another brand that they preferred to work with. What made this worst was the manner in which we the agency and the client were treated. It was more like a politicians denying a sex scandal in the face of clear evidence. In this case, even when presented with proof of the agreement we were told that the proof was not proof. Inception? should there be layers of proof within layers of proof and we just didn\u2019t have the right layer?Like I said, my team and I represent 15 of the most prestigious fashion brands in the world. You would think we would be treated with professionalism. So, let me ask you: do you think I will in good conscience recommend a paid partnership between a client and Tumblr at this point in time?\nKia goes on to compare his experiences with Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram. Even the latter two, which have been notoriously understaffed in their respective biz dev departments since they launched, have always done their best to be responsive to brand representatives, he says.\nA Cultural Problem?\nTumblr's problem isn't a lack of an analytics dashboard, Kia says. It's a cultural problem:\nSo far Tumblr has behaved with prejudice, without empathy, and without apology and, in doing so, it has bitten the hand it hopes will feed it someday. So make no mistake Tumblr can not correct this by developing platform analytics \u2013 it needs a change of regime and a change of culture.\nIn a phone interview, Philip Leif Bjerknes, digital director of agency ALLDAYEVERYDAY, suggested that Tumblr's current PR problem is a cultural one \u2014 and that may be one of the reasons recent attacks have taken such a personal turn.\n\"Tumblr doesn't have a corporate veneer in the way Foursquare or even Twitter now has, which leaves them open to a lot of personal criticism,\" he said. \"It's an interesting thing for people to be publicly assailing people in a company rather than the company itself. Structurally Tumblr has issues interfacing with brands, but brands have also never been a priority of theirs.\"\nBjerknes, who has worked extensively with Tumblr on behalf of his client Milk Studios, hastened to add that he and his agency have enjoyed a positive relationship with Tumblr thus far, and plan to continue to work with the company in the future.\nWe reached out to Tong about the allegations and received a response from Tumblr's communications liaison, Katherine Barna, pasted below:\nAs far as NYFW, last season was our first and we selected people who we felt made meaningful contributions to the Tumblr community. We learned a tremendous amount and tweaked our model in advance of this season. The selection process for the bloggers this time around was much more intensive; we put up an open call for submissions and recommendations, then spent a tremendous amount of time reviewing each and every single blog, evaluating each on original content, level of curation, unique voice, overall aesthetic, followers and traffic.\u00A0We're extraordinarily confident in the bloggers that we did select, as they all contribute to our community in very unique, meaningful ways. \u00A0Our team cares tremendously about the brands that have embraced our community in full force and we're incredibly excited about the early success we've had with our partners so far. They've been overwhelmingly supportive of the fact that these are alpha products and understand that we're constantly overhauling and iterating in the interest of building the best products we can for our community.\nNow it's your turn to weigh in.\nUpdate: Tony King, creative director of digital agency King &amp; Partners, also called to share his experience with Tumblr, which he describes as \"disappointing.\" \n\"I have been pushing Tumblr since the beginning, [both] with my own Tumblr and Tumblrs for brands including Jack Spade and Hudson Jeans,\" he says. \"We reached out to them I think it was in January or maybe it was December of last year \u2014 just after Rich Tong had been hired, actually \u2014 to see if I could help them with feedback and some things they needed to build, like an analytics dashboard.\"\n\"It took ages for them to respond. President John Maloney did respond and was very nice. Really appreciated the feedback. Then Rich didn't ever really follow up on a meeting. Our office is just down the street. It was really disappointing for people who have really believed and helped push the platform. I felt like they ignored their users completely. We still use it, and we've still been pushing it. When all this [coverage] happened we realized it's not just us they're ignoring, it's been happening to other agencies too.\"\nThumbnail courtesy of Flickr, Anthony Danielle"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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