Yahoo moved the Coin Again !

I came across an article in MarketingVox, which read

Yahoo has acquired ad targeting and delivery firm Blue Lithium for US$ 300 million, reports Advertising Age.The purchase is the latest in moves by major players to coin the behavioral advertising market.Blue Lithium adds a significant number of capabilities and inventory to Yahoo's existing ad offering.

The newly-acquired company boasts relationships with major publishers, which will continue after the purchase. Its inventory will be incorporated into Right Media Exchange, which Yahoo just acquired in full a few months ago.

Blue Lithium will run ads on Yahoo's network of fully-owned sites and services, bringing significant targeting power to ad delivery, something Yahoo aggressively began to target with the introduction of its SmartAds(Read my earlier post on smart ads) offering to the market.

Yahoo hopes adding a performance-based system will bolster the income from marketers looking for more than just brand impressions, characterized as a strength for the company.

Source MarketingVox

Ad Serving on YouTube

You Tube has started to ad serve.Mainly after much speculations among advertisers and YouTube fans, the GoogleTube now officially started their adverts.

So far on the site, below were the ad units, I have noticed

• 300x35 gif/jpeg banner
• 300x250 gif/jpeg banner
• In line video along with a 300x250 companion gif/jpeg banner

All the adverts are pushed through Doubleclick's DFP.I have taken few screen shots of the same

• A small banner ad below the main video content is displayed(as highlighted at the left hand side), refer screen shot below

• A click on this banner ad, would expand to a Video ad and starts to play which is clickable to the advertiser's page

• A static companion 300x250 banner is displayed at the right hand throughout the main video, which is again clickable
  

Pros:

• Video ads here are less intrusive in nature, and video plays ONLY when the user clicks on the small banner below main video

• When a user clicks on the ad, the acutal video is paused

• YouTube is serving ads only on the popular videos which are rich in quality.Advertisers get big relief by this, as many were doubting, whether would their adverts be displayed on all lousy video uploads by Youtube users

Pubmatic-an ad network optimizer?

Komli, an upcoming ad network has released a new system which works as an ad network optimizer and it is known as PubMatic. PubMatic is a software application which lets you push ads of various ad networks on to your website/blogs.Currently it allows Google Ad sense, Yahoo Publisher ad network, ValueClick and Komli.PubMatic would monitor the performance of every ad network and the best performing Ad network would be auto optimized there by resulting in maximum ROI.Beyond optimizing ad network, this system also optimizes the Ad slot frame, color of the Advert, reports to compare performance between ad networks.Isn't this cool?

How to use it?

• Just visit PubMatic and sign up, it is FREE
• Select the Ad networks you want run
• Select the Ad slot size and instruct PubMatic if you want to auto optimize color
• Once all this is done, you have an option to generate PubMatic Ad tag, Click and generate the tag
• Copy this Tag and paste it on your web site/blog(It takes 90min for the PubMatic tag to go live)
  

It is apparently clear that PubMatic would provide

• Easy interface for publishers to place ad networks and auto optimizing ad networks for best delivery and increase revenue
  
• Mutually beneficial for the complete gamut of parties involved such as advertisers, publishers and ad network
• PubMatic accelerates the volume of publishers to their ad networks
  

Though all this sounds good, I still have a doubt

If a publisher implements multiple optimized pub matic ad Tags at various slots on a single page(say example 728x90 and 300x250), will not the publisher see 728x90 Advert belonging to a different Ad network(example Google Adsense) and 300x250 of a different ad network(yahoo Publisher network) on the same page at a same time?

Problem is that, ad networks like Adsense, Yahoo, amazon does not allow publishers to place any other ad networks adverts except them.Publishers who violates, will have their subscriptions suspended.I am unsure if PubMatic has an intelligence system incorporated into PubMatic which ensures that different Adverts of different Ad networks is not displayed at the same time on a same page.

Currently, PubMatic is available for the First 100 publishers on a First come first serve basis.I got my subscription. I tried pubmatic its easy and kool. I have configured PubMatic to suit my Blog,and shortly would run Optimized PubMatic Adverts.

Yahoo Debuts Behavioral Targeting

In my earlier post(Title:Yahoo!'s Smart Ads a Behavioral Targeting) I discussed that Y! kick started their beta testing on behavioral targeting which they call as Smart Ads.Now Y! Debuts this service to all its users.

With Smart Ads, Y! apart from just targeting a potential user based on web behavior patterns, also has the ability to dynamically customize the online ads, so the ad would get greater influential rate.So as to do this, the advertisers would provide various backgrounds, text and other materials of the ad.All this would be later uploaded on their ad server and set up made accordingly.

As a result of this, a potential user not only just sees a relatively advert according to his/her mind, but also an attractive ad. So, Y! firmly believes that this combination would soar their position in display advertisement segment.Furthermore, the beta test conducted on their Yahoo travel portal already proved success.

Sequential Advertising a new strategy in online video

A new kid from heavy.com.As the name implies the advertisement's content would be thrown sequentially throughout the video.The idea behind this is to include series of narrative elements /story board which would hold the viewers till the last sequence of the advertisement.

Is not this concept sounds similar to the one we have come across TV and newspaper?I have seen print ads developed based on the similar concept by printing various sequence of an advertisement across various pages therby keeping the viewer's spirits up throughout the movie.

Sequential advertising offers a way of engaging viewers instead of repeatedly exposing them to the same creative or a series of disjointed ads. “We’ve seen a real problem with some advertisers,” said Heavy.com’s co-CEO, Simon Assaad, via MediaWeek.Mike’s Hard Lemonade will be one of the first advertisers to test out the new strategy this week, as it will run multiple related video ads within Heavy’s programming.

Having the history that longer video ads gives good conversion, this new kid has huge room to success for branding campaigns

Web2.0 concept on Banner ads

We have seen quite a lot of Ad types such as normal Gif/jpeg banner, Over the page, interstitials, streaming audios/Videos and also full page ads.Recently a new ad type has been launched whose connotation perfectly syncs with the industry type it belongs.

The banner allows one to transact on a secured layer.A viewer can actually see, learn and be able to buy a product without going beyond the banner ad.This concept has been introduced by the London based agency fhlame, and they call it as "Tailgate".This concept makes a prospect buyer's life easier by preventing him/her from going to advertiser's website to transact.

Try the Demo Click Here


Though this concept does good role in making transaction easier, certain significant factors that needs to be considered are

• Who would store the transacted data?If the fhlame maintains, how many advertisers would feel comfortable despite knowing the possible chances to misuse collected data for other similar advertisers

• The banner ad content would get congested.Lets say for a mobile handset advertisement, the advertiser has to put even the technical specs along with other infos of the mobile for one to buy.But the trend so far is, the creative which has minimal content does good conversions

This idea seems to be time effective however when we look at the other influencing market research data, this idea has to be further tunned.

Quigo's here, beware Google and Yahoo

Google and Yahoo one of the few web tycoons which predominates in performance based advert model.

We all very well know that unless one transforms frequent innovative ideas into reality, his/her product is doomed to loose its market value.

This statement has become very true when "Time Inc" annouced their merge with Quigo to provide PPC based campaigns on Time Inc network magazines which was previously handled by Google and Yahoo.Time Inc collaboration with Quigo is to gain access on Quigo's "Ad sonar" a performance based ad network.The other companies which has changed to Quigo are ESPN.com, Forbes.com and FoxNews.com.

The reason for this change to "Ad Sonar" is because of its excellent targeting and simple yet transparent reporting capabilities.Their ‘AdSonar’ technology allows advertisers to target ads contextually with specific keywords, by website section or by individual webpage.

Recognizing the demand for control and transparency, Google recently introduced placement performance reports so that, as per Quigo, advertisers can see where their ads have appeared along with site performance metrics(Refer to my earlier post title "Google Adwords now provides Placement Performance reports")