CBS Television Stations has launched the CBS Local Ad Network, a first-of-its-kind partnership between a major media company’s television stations and local bloggers and social media Web sites. The service offers marketers the ability to broadly reach local audiences while remaining attached to CBS station brand and content.
CBS-owned stations across the country are now syndicating local news “widgets” to a variety of blogs and hyper-local sites in the communities they serve. Each widget will feature top local headlines and images with links to the video and text stories on the CBS station’s site. Included in the widget is a companion banner advertisement.
The CBS stations will deliver real-time news feeds to the widget, allowing the content on the local partner sites to constantly change and update 24 hours a day.
In exchange for publishing the CBS local news widgets, owners of the local sites will receive a portion of the advertising revenue generated by the CBS stations, which will be responsible for selling the ad inside each widget. The CBS Local Ad Network already has received support from major advertisers, including AT&T, North Texas Honda Dealers, and Liberty Mutual Insurance.
The CBS Local Ad Network has already been launched in Boston (wbztv.com), Dallas/Fort Worth (cbs11tv), San Francisco (cbs5.com), Denver (cbs4denver.com) and Chicago (cbs2chicago.com). The roll out will continue over the next several weeks and also include the CBS-owned stations in New York (wcbstv.com), Los Angeles (cbs2.com and kcal9.com), Philadelphia (cbs3.com), Minneapolis-St. Paul (wcco.com), Miami (cbs4.com), Sacramento (cbs13.com), Pittsburgh (kdka.com) and Baltimore (wjz.com).
