If museums competed only with other museums for people's attention, this job would be much easier. Instead we compete with movies, football, chain restaurants, and car companies. It's disheartening to realize that Applebee's probably spends more on one day of ads than we'll spend in an entire year... anyway, until online ads came along, advertising outside our region or internationally was totally beyond our means. But now, because the web reaches audiences with a high degree of precision, we are deliberately targeting people beyond our region and, to a very limited extent, beyond our borders.

We've spent the last few months obsessing over which web sites are right for promoting Life on Mars. We're now buying a month of online at www.npr.org, which gets nearly 24-hour promotion from public radio stations across the nation. We're also buying space on some small but influential art blogs. Our biggest buy is with www.nytimes.com. Some context: a single ad in the Sunday Times Magazine is nearly $50,000. You can buy a house for less than that in Pittsburgh! You can also buy a lot of targeted www.nytimes.com for less than $50,000 too.

A Mars-like realization: online ad inventory seems to have been named by the Pentagon. You don't buy ads: you buy "presence" or  "road blocks" or "geotargeting" or "site domination," each of which seems to require the backup of a platoon. Anyway, we're planning road blocks of the Times Arts & Design section for the opening weekend of the show, followed by a month of various online ads in the Times Online's Arts, Arts & Design and Travel sections, where we'll target readers who log in from precise "geotargets" including New York City, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Buffalo. With our pals at Visit Pittsburgh, we're buying more www.nytimes.com geotargeting in the fall in those same sections, as well as www.torontostar.com, and ads on www.southwestairlines.com. We're also investing in buys with ARTFORUM in print and online, and in the print version of the London-based Frieze magazine, and plan a substantial presence with regional print, TV, radio and online, all of which we hope will drive traffic to our site, generate awareness for the show and get people excited about visiting Life on Mars.