BuzzLogic aims to make blog ads more engaging ― and more profitable

As advertisers search for ways to target the ever-growing blogosphere and the media industry looks for ways to monetize blogs, BuzzLogic's solution is to offer “conversational ad targeting” — essentially targeting ads to blogs with the most conversation and the most loyal audience. Today the advertising platform takes that a step further by unveiling a new ad unit not only aimed at targeting conversations, but also starting them. 

The new offering, called BuzzRoll, allows advertisers to display their own content, including RSS, social media feeds, and video and other rich media. The idea is to encourage blog users to interact with and share the content. The new widget is designed to work on BuzzLogic's Conversational Ad Targeting Platform, which targets blogs deemed to be the most influential about specific topics, trends and key terms.

When choosing those blogs as media partners, the BuzzLogic platform uses an algorithm to pinpoint relevant blogs by looking at publishing patterns, the conversations and audience, explained Peter O’Sullivan, vice president of sales. BuzzLogic staff also manually reviews every blog they select, he said.

O'Sullivan said conversational targeting enables advertisers to isolate conversations happening in the blog space. While blogs are an enormous market that advertisers want to tap, the market is highly fragmented, he said. BuzzLogic addresses this challenge by targeting based on conversation, rather than looking at the content vertically by topic.  “We come at it from a horizontal perspective, which is a lot more powerful for marketers,” said O'Sullivan.

As blogs continue to merge into mainstream media, O'Sullivan noted the channel is attracting more readers and therefore becoming a more important venue for advertisers. BuzzLogic is an “efficient one-stop shop,” for advertisers, he said. “They can come to us and get coverage across two-thirds of the blog space in a very precise manner.” BuzzLogic said it reaches more than 78 million unique blog readers monthly through its system.

For publishers, the result can be increased revenue from higher engagement, he said. During the beta period, BuzzLogic claimed advertisers such as the TV station CMT (example below) saw unit and video engagement rates two to three times higher than Doubleclick rich media benchmarks.

“It’s not just your standard banner ad, it’s a lot more engaging,” O'Sullivan said. “Publishers want to make sure they’re creating relevant experiences with their users.”