We are extremely excited to welcome Bloomberg.com as an advertiser to the RealClearPolitics.com web site. We created a new, premium position for Bloomberg that is persistent on the left hand nav bar above the fold and we worked closely with Incognito Digital, Bloomberg’s agency, on the design.

Additionally, we have set the ad up so that it takes a RSS feed from the Bloomberg web site to provide updates to the advertisement, automatically. We think this actually makes this much more than a “traditional” advertisement in that it is giving our audience at RCP relevant, timely information that is a nice adjunct to the political content at the site.

For those of you who have been tracking the conversation of feed-based advertising (see http://www.buzztracker.com/category/rss_advertising to track )– and there is a great post today by Fred on this topic, this is another example of feed-based advertising. Like Fred, we believe that feed-based advertisements have been around for a while; that RSS-based ads specifically have been around for a while, and they are cool.
The import for us of RSS-based ads, as opposed to other feed technologies, is that we finally have standard that all web publishers are using (or will use) and since all advertisers on the web are also publishers, that all advertisers are using (or will use). The standard should enable a huge growth in RSS/feed based ads. This is important because we believe that ads that our served from publishers using this technologies should deliver better results to advertisers — they should deliver better click through rates. The ads should be more timely, they should be more targeted, and to Fred’s point, they should be able to be “self-selected” by publishers and users alike as relevant to their audience.

As you can see by our post below, Feedburner clearly has a huge leg up in understanding the economies of scale and drivers of this new market. Whomever benefits on the ad network side — as more and more publishers like us adopt this type of advertising on our sites, this is great news for Publishers, Advertisers alike (though probably not as good news for television, cable, and other forms of advertising).

What do you think?