'Manchurian Candidate' Advertising on Political Blogs

Posted on 22, 2004
Filed under Online Marketing

I'm a frequent reader of political blogs like Daily Kos and the Juan Cole blog, and I noticed this weekend that Paramount's been advertising 'The Manchurian Candidate' on them. Given that the film portrays a corporate attempt to control the government, I'm guessing the ads are limited to lefty blogs (post a comment if you've spotted them elsewhere).

If you've been following the political blog arena, you know how politicians have been successfully using blogads.com to solicit donations. This is the first movie advertisement I've seen on their ad network, but it doesn't really surprise me -- look at these traffic rankings of the top political weblogs, and you can see why Hollywood is licking their chops. With a weekly ad on Daily Kos running at $325 bucks, and traffic at 136,000 users per day, you end up with a CPM well under a buck (you can plug the numbers into this calculator if you wanna get specific). Try to find a cheaper way to reach that many targeted eyeballs in print or broadcast!

With the kind of segmentation available with blogs, the movie marketers behind 'The Manchurian Candidate' are definitely on to something...