Federated Media is Damn Smart.

Federated Media is damn smart. Last year they took a popular television star for 15-35 year old men, created a video show where she could in-part pimp blogs that use FM for ad sales. While there were some issues with disclosure, it was a smart move as it could keep the wagons circling around FM. Today’s launch makes the above referenced campaign look like a kid’s meal at McDs.

The new program is called ExecTweets and I am sure you read about it on a variety of blogs today. If you haven’t heard about it – here’s the net takeaway… FM has sold some ads/sponsorships to Microsoft to create a new site called ExecTweets which will feature twitter messages from "executives" in a variety of categories. Twitter apparently will receive some revenue for pimping ExecTweets. Fine, another directory of Twitter users, yay.

BUT… there’s one important point that it seems all of the bloggers missed…

This is an absolutely awesome, intelligent marketing play for FM. Think about it – their job is to sell ads for the sites they represent. So now they have a central hub for all of the major companies and their "executive" twitter users right there for them. And I am sure each and every "executive" Twitter user will either want to be listed or will talk up the site – which will, in turn, talk up FM. Microsoft and Twitter really get the short end of the stick here.

Next, compounding the smartness, is how they appear to have selected the listed bloggers. On the ExecTweets about page, they list all of the "executives" in the system. Only two bloggers are listed, both are default Twitter users as well, Michael Arrington and Pete Cashmore. Both are users who basically only pimp out their story links and both use FM for ad sales. So just like with the Webb Alert, you see the circle of FM moving full blast. FM pimps two blogs that use FM for ad sales so any additional pageviews that FM generates for these two blogs through ExecTweets benefits them again with ads that FM handles. I assume they will add more bloggers and the traffic will be low but it’s still a smart move - why not keep users inside the FM network as much as possible.

Of course as Peter Kafka notes, most Twitter users won’t use the site for a number of reasons. But even if no one uses the site, it’s still a smart move for FM.