Blogads and TV

In this morning’s MediaPost, Shankar Gupta does a great round up of the surge in TV blogads.

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.” …

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.”

Another datapoint in this trend is AVP, whose initial trickle of ads turned into a gusher as the volleyball season progressed.