Paramount Partners with Technorati in Blog Marketing Initiative

According to Clickz, Technorati, the blog search engine, is scheduled to announce a multi-year movie marketing agreement with Paramount Pictures today. The article states that Technorati will aggregate relevant blog posts about Paramount films for use on the films' websites, and will provide ads and custom content as well. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The first film to get the Technorati treatment will be "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's new film about global warming:

Posts will appear today on the film's promotional site, Climatecrisis.net, which was created by Paramount. Aggregated information will discuss the film as well as the general topic of global warming. Paramount editors can highlight interesting or controversial posts on their own site. The site also features RSS feeds on global warming-related topics from major news sources.

The aggregated content will not contain full text posts, according to David Sifry, Technorati founder and CEO. "It's to drive people back to the blog. [Bloggers will] feel empowered. It's kind of like 21st century letters to the editor. It's setting the agenda. And for the studio, it's showing the power of the people formerly known as your audience. Rather than ask people to blog on their site, which has proven somewhat difficult for many film companies, they're collecting it."

From a movie marketing standpoint, Gore's film is the perfect choice due to the sheer size the democratic and activist blogger pools. However, it may be more difficult to promote films that have a less easily segmented audience, so it will be interesting to see which films they decide to promote on the site in the future.

Another interesting angle is that this partnership may spur individual bloggers to write posts about a given film for a chance at getting traffic from the film's official website, something we haven't seen before. We're also assuming that the aggregation will have to be hand-culled, since an automated system could lead to spam, or worse, a situation where a Fox or Sony related-post could appear on the Paramount site.

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Technorati Tags: Movie Marketing, Paramount, Al Gore