Nothing catches the eyes like the neon pink silhouette of a nude female, especially when run in high traffic media sites. MSNBC knows this and that’s just what they’ve done. An upcoming story from MSNBC has grabbed the attention of many because it’s showing up on about 800 blogs.
Anyone reading the more frequented blogs has probably seen trucker mudflaps-gone-blog-ads showing up on all kinds of these sites. In the search engine world, Search Engine Journal had a post about it right beside the ad in question. BlogAds took on the campaign and sent out an email to the sites. They said this is the largest ad-buy ever and is a pleasant way to end the new year. A portion of the email was reprinted on Search Engine Journal:
You got an e-mail from us this morning about a blogad purchased by MSNBC to promote its “digital day” the coming Wednesday. (Some teasers about the show in the middle of this page: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3096434/) . This is a nice way to end 2005.
To give you some personal context, this is biggest blogad buy ever – 800 blogs. This is more ads than Blogads.com sold in the entirety of 2003. (The previous record was held by Audi, which ordered ads on 286 blogs last spring.) I’ll leave it to the media mavens among you to figure out the larger ramifications, but for me this is just a darn pleasant way to end a good year.
This says a lot about the state of advertising in the blogosphere. It says they are legitimate and the command an audience that gets through and attracts attention. This isn’t for one specific type of blog either. It’s about reach overall. All types of high traffic blogs are being utilized too.
One interesting point has been the discussions on some blogs about the ads themselves. One blog, called MajikThise has had an interesting discussion. They discuss the marketing approach taken for this campaign as this ad campaign goes after both men and women. SearchEngine Journal discusses how MSNBC is using this to build awareness for some of their programming.
Blogs are coming into their own and are becoming more and more mainstream. Technorati says they’re tracking nearly 23 million blogs and MSNBC pulled some of the top blogs for their ad campaign. As blogging becomes more lucrative from the business sense, you’ll start to see more and more appear. The trick, as always, is producing quality content that distinguishes your blog from the rest of the pack.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
