To Promote a Cable Network, a Plan to Inundate the Internet
The MSNBC cable network plans to flood the Internet this week with its largest concentrated online pitch, running advertising on hundreds of Web sites and blogs. The cost of the campaign, to promote three prime-time programs, is estimated at just under $1 million.
Context & Ripple Effects
In late 2005, a cable network's audience-building playbook still ran mostly through on-air cross-promotion and print buys; MSNBC is instead concentrating what the network calls its largest single online pitch — just under $1 million spread across hundreds of Web sites and blogs — behind three prime-time programs.
The choice of blogs as a primary placement target matters: it treats the fast-growing independent publishing layer not as competition but as inventory, and makes MSNBC an early large-scale cable buyer in a channel whose ad pricing and measurement standards were still being worked out.
First-order effects
- Hundreds of Web publishers and bloggers receive ad revenue from a single concentrated cable-network buy, giving MSNBC's three promoted prime-time shows direct click-through visibility that a TV promo cannot measure.
Second-order effects
- Rival cable news networks face pressure to match the buy or cede online share-of-voice for their own prime-time lineups, shifting promotional budgets away from traditional TV and print placements.
- Blog advertising networks and intermediaries gain negotiating leverage as cable money enters the channel, pushing rates up for the mid-tail sites that can deliver scale.
Third-order effects
- If cable networks keep using the open web primarily as a promotional megaphone while revenue stays anchored in pay-TV distribution, the eventual collision — web video competing directly for the same viewers and ad dollars that fund cable — becomes a structural question for the whole genre rather than a hypothetical.
The trend: Cable television marketing is migrating from on-air and print promotion toward bought placements across the open web and blogs, with each network's online spend becoming a competitive signal.