Traditionally, TV executives promote their shows during other TV shows when, if nothing else, they know their ads are reaching people in the market for their product--TV.
But in recent
months, TV executives have increasingly started to advertise online--specifically on blogs, where inventory is cheap and where TV show promoters can target their ads to the groups believed most likely
to watch the 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.