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How To Solve The Viewable Ads Debacle (Mediapost 3.28.12) 0

If an ad shows up on a web page, and it’s below the fold where no one can see it, did it make an impression?

The buzz of this month is viewable ads, and the issue of whether or not your ads are being seen on the web.  It’s a big issue because, as we all know, click through is a horrid metric and actual click through rates are abysmal to say the least.  The only metrics that we’ve had left to champion have been exposure and engagement, and you can’t engage with something you never actually see.

The Comscore findings that 31% of all online ads are never seen are alarming, but also somewhat comforting.  If click through, engagement and interaction rates are so low, then at least we can discount those poor metrics by 31% and assume that if 100% of the ads were seen, then maybe the numbers would at least be a little bit better!  Really though, the fact that this high a percentage of ads are wasted is an issue because one of the strongest elements of online advertising has been the opportunity to reduce waste.  Online provides targeting, which means you can expose your message to only the most prime audience members, but now we find that a third of those prime audience members are not seeing the ads.  That is wasted value.

Back in the old days there was the concept of OTS, or opportunity to see. This concept was applied to the counting of online ad impressions, and was used by the ad-servers to come to a standard definition for an impression.  That definition is in place, and has been in place for years, however it’s clear the spirit of that definition has not been enforced by the long tail or the short tail of media.  Comscore also surfaced that the issue of viewable ads doesn’t get fixed by paying a higher CPM.  It’s an issue across the web.

What does this mean for the industry?

Well, one possible fix might mean that you tier the pricing for ads.  My suggestion would be that only ads above the fold are able to be priced on a CPM basis, and any ads below the fold of a standard website should be priced on a CPC or CPE (cost per engagement) basis.  Additionally, I would recommend that ads on mobile browsers be sniffed and priced in a similar fashion, realizing that the fold is much higher.  In the case of mobile, only ads at the top of the page would be CPM based and the rest would be performance priced or some other model. 

This is not a difficult issue to fix, in theory, but in practice it’s a doozy.  The bad news is the vast majority of “impressions” on the web are going to become devalued rather quickly and the overall opportunity for revenue from the long tail of websites is going to drop dramatically.  The good news is that the best inventory, the truly premium above-the-fold, quality inventory, is going to be priced higher.  It’s a simple supply and demand discussion.  There is more supply of below-the-fold, lower quality inventory and a finite supply of premium placements.  Think of it as a market correction for the ad industry.  These kinds of corrections are good in a maturing industry, and necessary if we are to take our rightful place as the number one advertising and marketing medium in the eyes of big brands.

Of course, we could just piddle around on this issue for a couple of years, and have “committees” and “initiatives” put in place to deal with it.  That would be helpful and productive (not so much).

How do you want to see this issues addressed?

Posted on: 04-1-2012
Posted in: treffiletti.com

UGC Is All Grown Up! (Mediapost 6.15.11) 0

User Generated Content gets a bad wrap.  At its inception online, UGC was immediately categorized as low-quality video content and brands were a bit hesitant to dive in and sponsor them (at the time, rightfully so), but in the last 3-4 years the hesitation has subsided and marketers are truly on board.  UGC is growing up!

There are two influencing factors that weigh into this maturation of the vehicle.  First off, the content itself has actually become quite good!  It boggles my mind when I watch these videos just how much free time people have!!  There are “haul” videos on YouTube where girls show the deals they get when they go shopping and these videos get over 1mm views each (JuicyStar07 is the leader, by far).    There are lots of news and pop culture video recaps, like the ones from the Smoshpit (routinely more than 200k views per edition).  There are music videos, guitar lessons, and of course skateboard videos (both with real people as well as dogs riding skateboards – I guess not everything has grown up).   Publishers like Lonely Planet make scores of videos and post them on YouTube.  A good portion of these videos get more viewers in a month than some daytime and cable TV shows do, so you can’t possibly say the quality isn’t there.  The quality is at least as good as, if not better than, One Life To Live.

The second fact is that with the sheer volume of content and visitors we’re seeing the best content curate to the top.  The cream has risen and the best videos are the ones being seen by millions of people.   Some stats say that as much as 20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, which means that there’s a lot to choose from, but if you scour and browse through YouTube you see the “best of the best” rising to the top.  What other people are watching is what will come up on a cursory review.   There are cooking shows as well as do-it-yourself videos as well as “scripted content” that rival what you see on Comcast.

If you chat with the younger generation of kids ages 12-18, you’ll find that many of these kids watch YouTube as TV, rather than watching mainstream television shows.  There are lots of people with significant followings on YouTube, and YouTube has made it very profitable for these young folks to make videos.  It’s proven to be such a strong opportunity that we have semi-professional and professional avenues for creating video content that is exclusively launched on YouTube.  YouTube has become a primary channel more so than many cable networks!

If you dive into the numbers you see something else interesting.  For the week ending June 5, 2011 the top performing shows on TV were the NBA Finals, The Voice and America’s Got Talent.   These shows garnered audience between 8.5mm and 5.6mm viewers in the 18-49 year old demographic.   YouTube garners approximately 15.4MM viewers between 18-49 years old in a week.  Some shows are getting 1mm views in a week.  To generate reach on the both avenues is actually similar, with YouTube potentially winning in terms of total reach.  To build frequency on those programs you would have to spend more money on TV than on YouTube because the CPM is higher.  What’s even more interesting is that the top shows on TV are sports and reality programming, which one could argue is no better than any of the UGC content you would find on YouTube, so in an apples to apples comparison I think the opportunity would be higher on YouTube than on traditional TV.

The industry itself recognizes this as many television sets are becoming equipped for YouTube and other web access.  The programming options are getting larger, the reach is getting larger and the content is getting better.  User generated content has matured, and marketers are paying attention!

How are you and your brands using UGC to reach your audience?  Share with us on the Spin Board!

Posted on: 08-2-2011
Posted in: treffiletti.com

Start-Up Watch COD: Shiny Ads Drives Revenue for Pubs From Thousands of Small Advertisers 0

Most pubs are focused on ad revenue as their primary source of income. Many have sales forces to sell direct, and then offer up the rest to exchanges and ad networks that can backfill — albeit at far lower CPMs. It stands to reason, then, that if a service could help pubs sell more inventory direct, then pubs could realize a higher average CPM and higher total revenue.

For most pubs, small and local advertisers are difficult to service directly because the costs of direct sales outweigh the revenue to be gained from this class of marketer. If an advertiser is spending a few thousand per month, having them work with an internal person quickly wipes out any margin advantage. This is why so many pubs have minimums of $10K-$25K before they will consider taking business.

A Toronto-based start-up called is out to change this dynamic by providing a plug and play ad sales solution that makes it possible to accept small contracts profitably. The key to their model is a self serve experience that lets the small advertiser identify their goals and targeting parameters and pay for inventory by credit card. All costly labor intensive tasks have been automated so the publisher can make real money on these small accounts.

Pubs can begin working with Shiny Ads by filling out a simple form that asks for the pubs monthly unique and content categories, as well as which ad serving platform it uses. From there, the publisher simply embeds the Shiny Ads experience into it existing Advertiser pages. Instead of incurring all of the people costs for serving <$5000 monthly accounts, Shiny Ads customers get to offer a modular buying experience demonstrated to drive high conversions.

In exchange, the pub pays a percentage of all dollars sold through Shiny Ads. Fees range from 20-25%, though very large sites can also explore custom pricing models with Shiny Ads.

The full feature set of Shiny Ads includes:

•Seamless integration with DFP, OpenX, AdGear, Appnexus, Adtech and GaM
•Support for any banner size and text size you offer
•A DIY banner builder so that small businesses without existing creative can quickly make attractive units to run on your site
•Flexibility to sell on any pricing model from CPM to CPC to CPD
•End to end financial solution that charges the client and quickly delivers your revenue share
Their interesting and informative intro video is here:

from on .

I like the Shiny Ads approach because they have so simplified the process of integrating their offering and working with small advertisers. I would imagine that setting up a system through which to capitalize on this revenue opportunity is on a lot of pubs’ to do lists. But rather far down in the priorities because of the time and expense they would incur to create a home grown approach. With Shiny Ads, pubs can quickly get started and ensure that they are not leaving a lot of small advertiser dollars on the table.

Small advertisers really do hold the potential to make a serious difference to pub revenue and profitability. Shiny Ads just made it a lot tougher to overlook that opportunity!

Posted on: 08-2-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: Inadco Delivers CPL at CPM Scale 0

Performance is the name of the game in interactive media – it’s one of the key reasons why digital’s growing faster than any other class of communications. But what we consider performance is evolving. While we used to live and die by the click, more and more companies are recognizing that we need to focus on business-relevant end results – performance that doesn’t always correlate with clicks.

is a start-up focused on delivering massive scale in business leads by converting standard banner units into lead collection “machines” that improve the number and rate at which real prospects are delivered to businesses. There’s a simple formula to this, but the most powerful ideas are almost always the simplest. Instead of driving people to websites and landing pages to collect contact information, Inadco delivers IAB-sized collection units across the web to environments with a high degree of likelihood to attract your prime customer types.

They assume the “risk” of this distributed lead collection system, by creating the units and paying the pubs that run the collector units. You pay on a cost per lead basis, so the performance risk falls on others.

They are betting – and winning – on the premise that their expertise in driving user response will make the process profitable.

Inadco says that the leads they generate are demonstrated to be high quality, and that this value is enhanced by three core business principles:

1.They are highly adept at identifying the best publishers on which to reach your audience
2.Leads are collected with forms that carry your branding, so respondents know who will be contacting them for follow-up. In other words, no surprises that might reduce closability
3.Their technology filters out respondes that are clearly of no value, so you aren’t purchasing information on people you have no ability to close
For publishers, Inadco promises that its form units drive significantly higher yield than standard ads. Pubs are paid on a bounty per qualified lead basis, and the revenue generated usually exceeds that made possible by CPM or CPC ad pricing.

Because the bounty per qualified lead can be relatively high, pubs are incented to deliver these units in locations and environments with a higher probability to deliver a qualified response. There’s a somewhat higher risk for a pub versus CPM, but as we all know most pubs simply cannot deliver the breadth and depth of content they want to under the existing CPM environment. With increased risk (usually) comes increased return.

As I said earlier, it’s simple, and that’s one of the things that makes it so powerful. The streamlining of the leads process is dramatic. No creative costs for you, no landing page development, no creative testing, no message testing. They manage all that, and can (they hope) do it better than you because they have so much experience in this field.

If leads are your business currency, you should definitely give them the onceover.

Posted on: 08-2-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: Image Space Media Turns Images on Pages Into Contextual Ad Environments 0

Are photos the final frontier of advertising? We’ve added sponsored messages to about every element of a page. From in-text to advertorial to banners here, there and everywhere. And of course pre-roll. Any way you slice it, there have been precious few areas of the page that have not been called into service for advertisers. And yet photos are the things most of us notice first.

It’s no accident that Huff Post’s pages, for example, are so photo heavy. Our brains process images much faster than words, so photos and pictures have always been a big draw in media – especially online media.

So it’s only natural that people have been madly at work trying to put the incredible contextual and visual real-estate value of editorial photos to use for marketer objectives. The CHALLENGE has been how to balance the intrusiveness with consumer experience – how to make an ad noticeable AND welcome. Or at least not despised.

A company called Image Space Media (ISM) believes it has the answer. Specifically, ISM has developed a set of ad products geared specifically to complement editorial images and add incremental impressions/ yield to web pages.

I’ll admit I was kind of skeptical about all of this. Well let’s call a spade a spade. I thought this would be profoundly icky. I imagined X-10 ads blinking over every image on a page, and sneaky deaky close buttons that are there on the unit but yet somehow impossible to spot. Boy was I pleasantly surprised to see that ISM appears to be just as concerned about user experience as, well, users. Their striking yet polite offering delivers on three “necessaries” to make this work:

1.Viewer activation of the units
2.Incremental revenue and yield per page
3.Contextual relevancy to an advanced targeting engine
They offer three kinds of units for three different situations:

Overlay Banners: These ads appear ONLY when the consumer rolls over an ad, and are targeted to offer contextual relevancy to the content of the image itself. They achieve this both through comprehensive analysis of the metadata for the photo and visually analyzing the image pixels themselves. And because three of you just saw a red flag in your mind’s eye, I’ll take this moment right now to assure you that they have a process for ensuring that the content in the photo is not objectionable, as well as a post audit in which the Mechanical Turk community is used to check every photographic instance.

Image Gallery Units: As the number of slide shows and photo galleries has increased online, millions of people are viewing images in a viewing session. This offering places overlay messages on alternating images in a gallery. Additionally ISM offers image sharing for users, clicking on the share button delivers a larger version of the photo, surrounded by a 728 and a 300×250.

“Photostitials”: These ads appear and time out in front of editorial images as part of a user’s viewing session. You pay for these on CPM. For those units that appear only upon rollover or click, you pay only once per viewer, even if that person rolls over a picture and triggers the ad again and again. The consumer experience is actually rather nice – a lot better than you’d imagine just by having this described to you. Further, the company takes pains to ensure that it provides publishers with best practices on appropriate limits to ad counts on a page or seen in a session. After all, no one wants a pissed off user.

The gimme here is contextual targeting. Like showing a McCormick ad on a recipe photo or an ad for a trip to Hawaii in front of blizzard pictures. But ISM also offers a full range of audience targeting methodologies like demographics, behavioral, and geographics. I did NOT think I was going to like this, but they won me over with their targeting capabilities and consumer friendly user experience.

If you are a pub looking for new ways to drive the shekels from your content, or a brand looking for a high impact way of getting noticed, check out their stuff.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first!

Posted on: 08-2-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: WinBuyer helps ecommerce sites better monetize pages and shoppers 0

As we get more experience in online retailing, it’s becoming even clearer that the rules are different. Consuemrs have the ability to leave and enter stores by making a single click, and have greater desire for information and transparency when they are shopping online. Given these realities, online stores are best served by testing and defining the new rules of (r)etail, rather than blindly copying the old school models of brick and mortar.

A fascinating company called WinBuyer is at the center of such efforts, and has developed a line of products that help online retailers drive revenue in some cool and frankly surprising ways. This innovative company has challenged some of the basic tenets of retailing, and has great results to show for its efforts.

WinBuyer has three products that can be easily integrated into online shopping environments:

•Relevant Buyer Advertising: A complementary advertising engine that displays relevant brand advertising for related products on your product pages, Relevant Buyer Advertising offers retailers high CPM ad opps through its client base of high quality brand advertisers and the sophisticated product matching capabilities that power it. So, for example, if you sell computer monitors, the platform could display ads for laptop brands on . You can specify the advertisers and categories allowed, so your brand and your customer stream is protected. The branded ads might be for items you carry, or items that fit with your lines but are sold by others.

•Onsite Comparative Pricing: This tool enables you to give consumers the option to see prices for the same item from other retailers, so as to demonstrate the great value that you offer. By plugging into the APIs of leading shopping comparison sites, OCP offers precise item-level matching and information from leading online commerce sites. Now, if you price a lot higher than other retailers, I’m guessing this has about as much appeal as dead fish lying in the sun. But if you are competitively priced, you are giving consumers the valuable insight that by buying from you they are making a good financial decision – that there is no need to continue shopping for price. You don’t need to offer the absolute lowest price to be appealing to consumers. I can certainly imagine paying $5 more for something expensive simply for the convenience of staying where I am. But when you consider that the vast majority of your site visitors leave and visit other sites before they buy, it’s easy to see how this offering drives demonstrably higher conversion rates across your site. You probably won’t win every pricing shootout, but if your pricing is good, it can potentially drive a dramatic increase in people who buy immediately.

•Related Products Listing: This tool presents similar items from other retailers on your product pages. Now, hold the phone, don’t freak out about that. The idea is not for every site or every type of product. The way it works best is when a site has high traffic and low conversion categories. For example, jewelry. Driving clicks and visits to other retailers can drive YOUR revenue because you earn affiliate referral fees on every sale your direct to their sites. Think about it in the context of high subjectivity categories. You sell costume jewelry. The consumer is looking for a silver necklace. You might not offer the perfect item for her. So she leaves. That’s the existing scenario. Using the Related Products Listing, you present thumbnails of other silver necklaces available on other sites. She sees something she likes, clicks, and buys from them. You didn’t make a sale, but you DO get a percent of their sale.

We often apply faulty brick and mortar CW to online shopping. In brick and mortar, a savvy selection and sales team can convert a very high percentage of customers. An item might not be EXACTLY what the consumer had in mind, for example, but a good seller can showcase its charms and drive a sale. But in online, conversion rates are nearly always rather low. Consumers want perfect matches, and the costs of comparison shopping are near zero in both money and time. No gas. No driving time. No looking for a parking spot. Just point and click.

Given that absolutely different shopping dynamic, we need to rethink the rules about the things it makes sense to do on our pages. And as in the movie Miracle on 34th Street, sometimes it pays for Macy’s to tell people what’s available at Gimbel’s. So to speak.

Santa would be very proud.

Seemingly unusual ideas and concepts are worth serious consideration as we work to drive more from our online stores.

WinBuyer is an Israeli company with offices in Phoenix, AZ and London.

Posted on: 08-2-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: Addroid replaces the video middleman with a middleSaaS 0

Digital media is ridiculously complicated to buy and to develop creative for. Anything that makes that process simpler, faster, and cheaper is likely in a great place to get adopted and gain significant market traction.

Which is why is garnering more and more attention in our business. Addroid is a SaaS-based ad development environment and solution that makes it easy to make video ads to run in IAB banner sizes. Their goal is to replace expensive middleman technologies like the rich media providers with a drag and drop solution that creates an attractive add more or less immediately.

The cost structure of running video can be pricey. Serving a video ad is significantly more expensive than a Flash banner. According to Addroid, using one of the major rich media solutions companies (MediaMind, EyeWonder, PointRoll, and even DoubleClick) adds a cost of about 40 cents to the CPM versus a gif banner. Their platform takes that down to 15 cents.

Developed by an agency called Neoganda, Addroid is web-based, and provides an ad development environment where you quickly add creative elements and publish a video ad.

Here’s a video where their Founder explains the value proposition and shows the drop dead simple process of ad development:

from on .

If you watched the video, you learned that going after the rich media company business is only part of their vision. They believe that brands and agencies would develop a lot more video ads instead of Flash banners if they could. By significantly reducing the video markup, they believe that they have created a pricing sweet spot to drive a dramatic transition in the industry.

Lemme tell me why I think they are on to something big. There are entire industries like entertainment and auto that would surely drop Flash but quick if video were more affordable. But many of the categories that would be most interested in making such a change are very value-oriented.

Oh, let’s call a spade a spade. These categories are filled with cheap sumbitches, though I don’t mean that as an insult. Let’s take entertainment as a for instance. When you have only a couple weeks and a limited budget to hype a film, you need to make every impression and every dollar count. So we shouldn’t be surprised that their buyers don’t throw money around willy nilly.

Which is why, I think, we still see Flash banners for some movies and TV programs, even though video would surely be more compelling.

A reduction from 40 cents to 15 cents represents a big drop in cost structure.

And there’s another cool thing. By replacing Flash banners with HTML video units, advertisers can better reach and persuade tablet users, 99 and 44/100s of whom are on iPads that don’t run Flash.

The name threw me a bit. I was expecting a mobile solution. But no matter, it is clearly designed to communicate the idea that they have replaced the middleman with a droid – or rather a SaaS.

So adding that up. Cheaper. HTML 5. Cheaper. Faster. And cheaper. I would imagine that more than a few of those reading this are already dialing.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Posted on: 05-28-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: Analog Analytics “democratizes” daily deals with a white label solution for media companies 0

Billions of words have been written about the financial troubles of traditional media companies. While most of these entities have established websites with growing traffic, the declines on the traditional revenue side are very hard to make up with digital. How many billion banners do you need to sell to make up for the full page ad losses and the virtual demise of the classifieds sections?

But it would be a mistake to think that traditional media companies are giving up without a fight. Many of the leaders are innovating to find new revenue streams. And given all the hoopla about Groupon et al, it should come as no surprise that many media entities are implementing proprietary daily deal and couponing programs as part of their monetization efforts.

A company called makes it easy for media properties and brands to offer their own daily deals and coupon programs. Their solutions makes implementing such programs more or less turnkey “Just add deals!”

The glass half full view of the success of daily deals is that pubs can capitalize on the trend. But the glass half empty interpretation is perhaps even more compelling. From their website:

Groupon operates by eliminating the role of publications through its direct-to-consumer “group buying” model. This eliminates the publisher from the traditional advertising model. In many cases, Groupon is signing local SMB’s to premium exclusivity contracts, which precludes the advertiser from doing a deal of the day with anyone else for the term of the agreement. In short, if you are a TV, radio, or news publisher, Groupon is stealing your advertising customers and signing them to premium, long-term contracts. This is the most significant threat to publishing since Google.

Analog Analytics gives pubs a way to fight back and claim their share of this important new promotional category. There are six components to their offering:

“Bigger Better Deal” is a hosted publisher-specific daily deal software platform, enabling the sales teams of media companies to sell and implement daily deals programs quickly and easily.
Hosted Coupon Platform offers pubs a way to display and deliver coupons to users, and sell these services to local advertisers.
Coupon Manager enables the seller to implement and manage coupons from hundreds of buyers simultaneously.
Manage My Coupons Portal is a hosted offering that gives consumers an environment in which to manage the coupons that interest them. In some categories the platform can automatically send offers to retail loyalty cards.
An Analytics Platform enables reporting and analysis to demonstrate marketing effectiveness and provide information to up sell and cross sell promotion programs to advertisers, related categories, and competitors.
“Super Banner” Mobile Couponing Solution enables click to call and click to coupon mobile advertising as part of an integrated program. Analog Analytics has signed a long list of media companies – more than 1000 — to their service.

The brand has an impressive number of case studies demonstrating the positive impact their offering can have on the finances of their clients.

One of the more prominent case studies for Analog Analytics shows how the OC Register generated $188,000 in revenue for a daily deals program in a single day. The program combined an online daily deal with newspaper and local radio support. It would have taken about 38 Million banner views (at a $5 CPM) to drive that revenue figure with online ads.

But the immediate deal revenue was only part of the story. In addition, they garnered 750 new subscribers from the effort. At an average LTV of $200, those subs represented an additional $150,000 to the company. If you’re following along with your calculator, you know that’s another 30 million banners worth of green. That’s the kind of math traditional media companies – and pure play digital media companies – love to see.

Media companies are definitely excited about such services, in particular the daily deals. Witness this TV ad hyping the availability of such local daily deal offerings to consumers.

I for one am happy to see pubs finding new ways to make serious money. If we’re going to have professional content, we’re going to have to devise ways to help pubs have the wherewithal to produce it.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Posted on: 04-30-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: AdExcite creates valuable video inventory with “new standard” ad units 0

The history of the banner ad market provides a classic example of the relationship between supply, demand, and pricing.

Most pubs were launched with the expectation that ad revenue could more than cover their operating costs. During the last dozen years, literally millions of sites have launched with this presumption. This led to loads of new banner ad inventory. The growth in the supply of banner ads outstripped the growth in demand, so prices fell.

In order to make up for the revenue shortfall, pubs added more units per page, which meant that supply growth accelerated, outpacing demand even more substantially. Additionally, the number of competing messages on pages reduced ad noticing value and effectiveness. Prices had nowhere to go but down still further.

And where have we ended up? Rock bottom pricing for ads on cluttered pages – ads that largely don’t work very well. Pubs lose. Consumers lose. Brands lose.

A company called AdExcite is out to change the paradigm by creating a set of broad reach ad units that offer great brand impact, pleasant consumer experience, and green for the pubs. This LA- and Austin-based start-up wants to improve the ad environment by creating “new standard” units at real scale. And they do all this through a technology platform that lets quality sites participate WITHOUT reengineering themselves.

The first offering is an over the page video plus companion ad that acts as a pre/interstitial.

Brands get more high quality video inventory to buy – with high quality editorial “surround.” Consumers get a video instead of six more blinky blinky click now banners on every content page. And pubs get to capitalize on the higher CPMs for video – even if they don’t offer (or offer much) video in embedded players on their pages.

Currently they are delivering 30-40 million plays a month. Certainly the appeal of these units is getting noticed. AdExcite reports broad video ad network acceptance of these units. Plus they are selling direct through Q1 Media.

AdExcite plans to deliver more than just these over-the-page-video plus companion banner units. They are also launching some other high impact ad experiences that any publisher can easily offer on their pages. These include:

•A “slider unit” that delivers a video or rich media unit in a slide-out format
•A ”mouse-over unit” that delivers video or rich media
Using their technology platform and units, AdExcite believes that pubs can get out of the “race to the bottom” — a marathon that starts with short term revenue needs and ends with 18 blinking banners on a page at a nickel CPM.

An admirable and potentially lucrative goal. How often is it plausible that a lose lose lose can be turned into a win win win? Said Cofounder Phil Banfield, “The pubs that are signing on with us get it – their editorial content is valuable. They know they should be earning more for it and that their audience will understand the value trade-off, because our ads are presented in an attractive, acceptable and effective format.”

They are also working on a full publisher solution the enable sites to manage AdExcite and other third party ad providers from a single platform. Additionally, they plan to offer “new standard” ads in social media and mobile apps.

Thanks to ad:tech for running this first.

Posted on: 04-10-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer