Finding Your Audience in a Fragmented World: Blogs & Contextual Advertising

The New York Times reports on an aggressive campaign by Universal Pictures for the new film, "The Constant Gardener." Given the movie's decidedly political focus, the studio has engaged in media buys across blogs such as Wonkette and websites including The Nation, Harper's and National Review. These tactics are not only helping the studio locate an audience, they also provide a conduit for micromarketing a more resonant message.

"The ads for 'The Constant Gardener' seem to seek out people who distrust multinational corporations. The banner contains the taglines 'The corruption is contagious' and 'The conspiracy is global,' and links to the film's Web site, where snippets of dialogue about 'payoffs, cover-ups, unmarked graves' can be heard in the trailer."

While blogs and RSS marketing provide media planners with opportunities to find niche communities, contextual advertising may offer the most effective and efficient way to aggregate demand across the "long tail." These are not mutually exclusive tactics, as contextual advertising is now appearing within blogs and RSS feeds. A recent WebProNews article describes the advantage provided by these intersecting trends:

"[T]he Web is rapidly evolving into an interactive market for building social communities of people with common interests. This has radical implications for marketers, who can now engage in behavioral analysis of these groups to help better target them with messages that reflect their common interests... New technologies, combined with data and analytics, are enabling a level of customizable targeting unprecedented in the industry. It is against this backdrop that contextual advertising is evolving into one of the most vital technologies in Internet marketing.

In today's marketplace, contextual advertising has become an indispensable tool to successfully attract consumers online. Its precision targeting is essential in an era of ongoing audience fragmentation and shorter attention spans. Today's busy, technologically-savvy consumer demands a customized approach containing information about products and services they care about. Contextual advertising fulfills this need and is the solution to the marketer's dilemma of accomplishing more with less."