Topix Weblog

March 14, 2005

Big News? We have the just the place for you...

by tolles at 12:24 PM

Today, we helped promote a major deal between DURECT and Endo Pharmaceuticals by enabling a new ad form factor -- a front page announcement -- as well as a follow on set of RSS advertorials.

There has been some discussion in the media of what it means to be a "Paper of Record" and, while we have a long way to go -- having a public company promote an important deal via Topix.net is something we think is pretty cool.

As a marketing guy, one of things that I like about Topix.net is that we can connect content to audience for promotions and announcements. In marketing, we all know what's happened to the press release on the web -- up for a few hours, then off to web purgatory...the question is -- how do you get the news in front of the people you want in addition to your PR efforts?

Coincidentally, one of things that we've been trying to do is keep the advertising we do contextually relevant -- and the ability to put (clearly demarcated) paid announcements about a pharmaceutical deal into appropriate pages at Topix.net (in this case our Business, Pharmaceuticals and Biotech pages), meets the needs of the three different constituencies that need to be served - The advertiser (DURECT), the audience (of the relevant news pages) and the publisher (us).