• by Shankar Gupta , September 16, 2005

Mass media outlets like TV networks have been fretting over the rampant rise of micro media outlets such as blogs, which threaten to splinter their audiences even more. In a twist, the big media guys are embracing the tiny media outlets as a new means of promoting their shows to prospective viewers. In recent months, TV promotion departments have stepped up their online advertising efforts--especially on TV-oriented blogs--where inventory is relatively cheap, and where they can target people who are most likely to watch their programs.

This year, VH1, TBS, and several PBS affiliates have all promoted their shows via BlogAds, now the leading blog advertising network. TBS has advertised "The Real Gilligan's Island," "Sex and the City," and "Minding the Store" on entertainment-related blogs, while PBS has promoted somewhat weightier content--documentaries about Robert F. Kennedy, Fidel Castro, and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and a series called Frontline/World, which features journalists in foreign countries telling their stories.

Lauren Prestileo, the national publicist for PBS's "American Experience" series--which has featured biographies of RFK, Castro, and Kinsey--said BlogAds offered a cheap way to target ads to politically-minded consumers for public broadcasting.

For example, BlogAds displayed 12 million impressions for the PBS Boston affiliate's documentary about Kinsey, which aired in February. "That's amazing exposure right there," she said. "To get 12 million impressions with print would be very, very expensive, and it would be a much less targeted audience."

"We don't have a ton of resources, obviously," she added. "There aren't a lot of places where you can spend $1,500--or up to $5,000--and get that much exposure and to such a targeted audience. Online advertising in some regards can be prohibitively expensive, at least when you're dealing with public programming and non-profits."

BlogAds doesn't use cost-per-thousand impression pricing; rather, it charges marketers to run ads for a specified length of time ranging from one week to three months. A week of the most expensive ad space--the premium spot on Daily Kos--costs $5,000. Daily Kos's Web site, which posts its traffic numbers, indicated on Thursday that the site had received more than 5 million visitors that week.

Richard Turner, the senior vice president of interactive marketing at TBS, said that the high return on investment, and the ability to reach the coveted "influencers," is what attracted Turner to the proposition of advertising on blogs. "They tend to be an efficient media buy," he said. "They are effective at reaching opinion leaders, or at least opinionated people." TBS generally combined promotion on blogs with rich media ads and search marketing, Turner said.

Jessica Smith, a publicist for interactive media at PBS' "Frontline/World," agreed that the appeal of blog advertising for her show was the audience that it allowed her to target--people who already show an enthusiasm for the type of program she was hawking. "Blog readers are the kind of people who are interested in current events and news, but they're also interested in people," she said. "That's what we do with Frontline/World--it's personal stories from around the world."

Turner, Smith, and Prestileo all said that their organizations are planning to continue using blog advertising in the future to promote their shows.