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Adify: Five Of 11 Ad Categories Up Big In Q1

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Food and sports were the categories posting the biggest year-over-year gains in ad pricing in the first quarter, according to the latest quarterly data from vertical ad network Adify. The average effective CPM for the food segment increased 179% to $4.19 from a year ago, while sports was up 121% to $4.

On a quarterly basis, prices shot up the most in the real estate category, where eCPMs nearly doubled to $4.52, as well as a 20% increase in ad impressions and a 13% increase in sell-through rate. Adify attributed the increases to continued recovery in the housing market and increased rates in non-endemic advertising in the segment.

The healthy living and lifestyle vertical had the second highest growth over the last quarter, with pricing up 35% to $10.97, the highest eCPM of any category tracked by Adify.

"Five of the eleven key verticals experienced major growth in Q1 this year," said Adify President Russ Fradin, in a statement. "Now that the Adify Vertical Gauge (AVG) has measured five quarters we're able to get a full view of how vertical eCPMs have fared year over year. Seven of the 11 verticals have higher average eCPMs in Q1 2010 than in Q1 2009, signaling a strong and consistent rebound."

The four that don't are news, travel, moms and parents, and business. Those areas, along with sports, saw a 13% downturn on average since the prior quarter. Adify said the results were largely seasonal, with an expected drop-off from the fourth quarter, when ad budgets tend to be highest. But the pricing declines in those categories from a year ago, except for sports, suggests the contraction is more than seasonal.

As far as the near tripling of the food eCPM, Adify said it reflected consumer packaged goods advertisers becoming more comfortable with the online medium. The company's quarterly analysis of eCPMs is based on direct-sold campaigns on more than 18,000 sites across its 200 vertical ad networks. The formats covered includes banner ads, rollovers, roadblocks, sponsorships, and rich media campaigns.

Advertising vs. Editorial: Can This Marriage Be Saved?

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

"Explore the Innovation Hall of Fame," reads an ad for Intel's 2010 Core Processors on NYTimes.com's home page this week. It encourages Web site visitors to roll over the ad to view selected articles from the newspaper's archive.

The takeover ad - built by Venables Bell & Partners and The Visionaire Group - then expands to show a blue circle; the circle's outer radius has a timeline spanning 1910 through 2010 and it included 10 hatch marks. The first mark, placed on 1914, leads to an article from that year headlined, "Evolution of the Motor Car Has Been Meteoric." Other articles from the NYT's archives herald the arrival of the phone, TV, mobile devices, and man's first walk on the moon - and were written at the time of those developments.

Move ahead to 2010: "Intel's Bet on Innovation Pays Off in Faster Chips," reads the headline that links to an article published Jan. 14, 2010 in The New York Times.

Don't be confused: This is an ad that incorporates articles written without the influence of the advertiser. Are readers smart enough to know the difference? I'd like to think so.

Welcome to 2010, an era when The New York Times Co. and other publishers are experimenting with advertising and publishing technologies to help shore up revenues. These efforts come at a time when ad dollars are abandoning print newspapers and magazines faster than a Toyota careening down a California freeway.

Seismic changes in advertising and media - offline and online - were also the theme at last week's 2010 Media Summit, sponsored by Bloomberg BusinessWeek. There, Richard Samson, senior counsel at The New York Times, discussed another Intel home page domination ad at NYTimes.com. That ad, promoting the theme "looking to the future," included a mock up of what The New York Times might look like in 2040. "We were very careful...to maintain the integrity of journalism and not give an appearance of influence. Our editorial department is not at all involved in the ads," he said.

The New York Times is not alone in finding new ways to work with advertisers.

An Intel ad on Cnet's home page this week sent Web site visitors to a review page. Under an Intel ad on the review page, there is a list of headlines and links to Cnet news and features about products made with Intel processors. Next to that, there is a list of headlines, published under the title, "Articles and tools from Intel" that includes links to marketing materials from the processor manufacturer.

And this week, Gannett-owned PointRoll introduced a new banner ad unit that allows advertising content to live inside a banner adjacent to editorial content pulled from a publisher's site.

In one example, an ad for Verizon's FiOS service incorporates video clips from Discovery's show,"Everest Beyond the Limit: Avalanche Alley." When a Web site visitor activates the video player to watch "Everest," she also sees a display ad for FiOS TV that reads, "See Everest the way it should be seen. On FiOS TV."

Publishing and Advertising in the Hot Seat

In two high-profile cases, advertising has been the key issue involving lawsuits; one involves an online review site and the other, a print trade mag.

Two California businesses filed suit against Yelp, alleging the site removed positive reviews about their businesses when the firms did not purchase ads. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman contended in a blog post that the claims are false and "ignore empirical evidence in favor of conspiracy theories."
Variety, a trade magazine, has come under fire because a negative review about the movie "Iron Cross" disappeared from its Web site. Pundits questioned whether the review was removed because the movie producers paid Variety $400,000 to help promote the movie as an Academy Awards contender. According to NYTimes.com, the producers are now suing Variety for contractual breach, negligence, fraud and deceit, and unfair business practices.

Additionally, concern that bloggers had been accepting freebies from advertisers in trade for favorable reviews prompted the Federal Trade Commission to establish voluntary guidelines for product endorsements last year. The guidelines call for endorsements made through blog posts or other social media channels to disclose any "material connections" between advertiser and endorser.

LA Times, Down the Rabbit Hole

Or consider the dust up over an ad in the print edition of the Los Angeles Times. On March 5, the newspaper published a mock front page, which was part of a promotion for the movie, "Alice in Wonderland" and featured Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. (Sharon Waxman, editor-in-chief of TheWrap.com, reports the ad pulled in $700,000 for the newspaper.)

By end of day, the Times' newsroom received 175 calls and e-mails about the ad; most people were unhappy, wrote Deirdre Edgar, reader representative at the LA Times, in a blog post.

Wrote reader Jim Hergenrather of Los Angeles:

The use of a legitimate image of the front page of The Times as the background for a movie ad is an insult to journalism. It derides the value of news and simply suggests you have adopted the position that a newspaper's editorial content is now nothing more than a vehicle for marketing.

Yet other readers were amused. Wrote Richard Vallens of Irvine, CA:

The Alice in Wonderland (false) front page is absolutely, positively the cleverest idea EVER. It totally tricked me, in the most delightful way. Brilliantly executed. Brilliantly!

Bottom Line for Advertisers and Publishers

So how flexible should publishers be when working with advertisers? Most important, how will Web site visitors, fans, followers, and others respond to new advertising approaches that include the blending of editorial and advertising?

"We have to be clear in our disclosure who we are and on whose behalf we are reporting. It should not be hidden in the fine print," said Joelle Gropper Kaufman, SVP, worldwide marketing at Adify, a vertical ad network owned by Cox. "It serves advertisers and publishers well to make it clear to the consumer. We should all be striving for that...As long as we treat consumers [and] readers with respect, they will return it."

A Death Foretold: Are Ad Networks In Decline?

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0600

MediaPost - Every year someone claims that THIS YEAR will be the last that advertising networks can survive. It seemed very much possible, since in 2005 almost anyone with a few dollars was able to throw a page together and claim they were an ad network.

Names like Admanage, AdThrill, AdCall, AdToll appeared all over ad:tech, each one claiming to have something new and different that made them unique. One company just admitted what they were, and called themselves the "Blind Network" basically admitting that agencies and marketers would have no idea where they appeared. Other networks were doing the same thing, but were a little less honest about it, passing around site-lists that claimed, among other things, they exclusively represented major properties from CNN to the WhiteHouse official blog. RightMedia, with its plug-in-play system allowed someone's middle-school kid to basically start an ad network, and at least seem like they knew what they were doing. Yet now, entering a the second decade of the century, the ad networks are dropping like flies, revenue's shrinking from public companies, and the future of ad networks seeming a bit grim.

A friend of mine a few weeks ago sent me a message on Linkedin congratulating me for starting to write again. I hadn't spoken to him in a few months and asked how he was doing with his new job at Advertising.com. He informed me that he had been laid off and was looking for a new job. "If you've been paying attention," he told me on the phone when I called him up, "the economy stinks." He informed me that there were major changes over at AOL, and many people in the Advertising.com side of things were no longer going to have jobs. Indeed, AOL had made some huge changes, changing from a portal and a huge ad network to seemingly a collection of professional blogs. My friend Saul Hansel with the New York Times has just moved to AOL to run content on this new network just a few months ago. Something was definitely happening when the biggest player in the industry seemed to quickly be packing their bags and making significant changes.

It's easy to say that all these changes are happening because of the economy and thus agencies have smaller budgets. We know that the economy has made a huge difference in the network play, but that wouldn't explain how some companies like Winstar Interactive, bought out of bankruptcy, are doing better than ever. Adam Guild, CEO and Owner of Winstar makes it clear that he is not an ad network, but instead an outside sales force, which has deep connections within the agencies and able to provide the same service an in house sales force would. He implies that perhaps there are smaller budgets, so that agencies are much stricter about the results of their ads as they risk losing more and more clients. Since he represents only a handful of really high quality sites, he's not seen the significant impact that some ad networks have made.

Tony Winders, Vice President of Marketing at ValueClick seemed to agree that there was going to be some major changes in the industry. He told me that most networks "will disappear because there is not a long-term, scalable revenue model in the face of stiff competition from larger players with deep relationships, massive scale, more data and better targeting and optimization technology." When asked why agencies would work with some of the smaller, lesser known networks, he quipped back "better question is, why should agencies bother? Performance may speak for itself and it's a relatively low-risk proposition to test, but agencies' time and reputation with their clients is far more important. They are better off establishing deeper relationships with fewer network partners with a reputation for quality, performance and scale." This seemed to make sense, but what else would one of the biggest players in the industry say, except since they are bigger, they must be better.

Adam Boettiger, Digital Strategist with the New Group, works on campaigns for clients such as Jenny Craig, Intel and QVC, was definitely with Winders and echoed some of the same ideas. According to him, he doesn't work with any of the sub-tier display ad networks, because as a small interactive agency, he just "doesn't have the time to deal with them." Boettiger says, "As a media buyer when I have to manage ad networks, it's just much easier to work with the big ones such as AOL and Valueclick because they have greater reach and better service." After talking with him for a while, it almost seemed that Winders might be right: Bigger was better and perhaps that was just going to be it. Why waste your time with small networks, when big networks were able to easily take your budget and provide just as good, if not better value proposition.

Of course that's just it, and Boettiger pointed out: "It's the same problem, for many years, those clients and brands have no idea where they will appear when booking on these networks." Adam wouldn't say that the networks are lying about where they have placement, but says that too many of the more questionable networks are just brokering ads from other networks and brokers. "When there are questions about where the ads appeared, such as a porn site, they will just blame it on some rogue network they work with." He said it was a huge problem of "inbreeding in which networks were buying from other networks, and then selling to other networks." His description of what went on almost sounded like there was a secret marketplace in the Bronx in which cabals of ad networks would meet at midnight to sell their inventory, unbeknownst to the ad agency that had booked it. One company representative had called it "Daisy Chaining" and basically blamed a huge part of it on particular ad exchange.

Famed Harvard Analyst, Ben Edelman, who has become more known as one of the top fraud and adware experts in the industry than anything else now-a-days, might actually agree with this proposition of there being rouge ad gangs. He points out that "networks vary dramatically in their ability and inclination to root out fraud. Even some well-known 'top' networks continue to charge advertisers for traffic they know to come from spyware, adware, and invisible windows." He says there is a growing problem as networks "publishers are certainly engaged in fraud, and they fail to implement adequate policies and procedures to eject such publishers, reverse payment to those publishers, or protect advertisers from unwarranted cost."

Chris Berman, the COO of Dedicated Media, a mid-size ad network not ranked that high by Comscore, seemed to know a bit of what was going on, and was surprisingly candid about this issue. "There are undoubtedly a lot of shady players out there and in the past there has been good reason for mistrust of some ad networks." He went on to describe that "in the past it was easy to ride the wave of dollars flowing into the online space, line up some cheap inventory in an Exchange and call yourself an ad network." He saw that even though there seemed to be a new ad network daily, selling the same inventory as the network opened the previous day, he saw that "there are also several reputable and innovative ad networks to choose from." Of course, he was one of those networks -- who would ever admit being one of the bad guys? Most of the ad networks would claim they were reputable, that they were providing a service, and that they weren't distributing their ad tags to porn sites. If I were an agency, how would I know that Dedicated Media wasn't one of those networks? Berman, however, had a solution, one of the first I've heard an advertising network of his size propose: "Third party verification services such as DoubleVerify and AdSafe Media will hopefully erase that mistrust," pointed out Berman, "and any network unwilling to offer this type of accountability is one that advertisers should stay away from." Rampant fraud, combined with lack of trust in smaller ad network placement could easily be a reason that the ad network market could be shrinking? Was it possible that agencies just had given up working with ad networks unless they were 100% sure they were safe? I'm sure that was part of it, but it couldn't explain entirely what was happening.

Berman continued, "It definitely is an actively changing marketplace. Increased competition and rapid innovation has forced us to focus, not just on what our clients need now, but what they are going to need 12 months from now." He said that Dedicated Media's "primary focus on the display side is acquiring as much demographic and behavioral data as possible and optimizing the way we target those data segments to get the desired results." Was this it? Ad networks just need to pixel more people in order to survive? Stick a pixel on a consumer, and then target more ads -- that is what certain companies have been doing for at least five years, under the guise of behavior targeting.

Joelle Kaufman, Senior VP at Adify, a company that provides both serving technology and other tools for a growing plethora of vertical networks, knows quite a bit about the issue. Kaufman obviously thought that many ad networks were going to disappear, but didn't want to share with me the specific ones." Ad networks must be able to prove they have value beyond what the advertiser can get itself on an exchange. If you cannot add insight, data or interesting content, why would the advertiser need you?" She mentioned that agencies were getting more and more sophisticated and many of them could easily get direct placement with publishers and their inside sales teams. "Vertical Networks are what bring value. These networks bring insight into the consumers - this isn't knowledge agencies will have on their own, or sites that they can easily find on their own." Joelle was extremely knowledgeable about this issue - in fact most of their business is built on building vertical ad networks, many of them which have become enormously successful. She showed as example, the Gay Ad Network, a very young start-up network that has grown larger than Gay.com and Planet Out in reach to the GLBTG community. This was where all money was going to be spent in 2010 she said. This seemed interesting, and not so much gloom and doom focused as some of the other people I spoke to made it out to seem.

Jake Dobkin, an old friend of mine from NYC, who publishes a group of city related websites, including NYC focused Gothamist.com, points that those networks as a whole are on the way out, refuses to work with any ad networks, large or small because of all the various issues that he's had with them. "Agencies want to go direct to properties like ours anyway. We are able to provide them with tailored campaigns, special elements plus active campaign management - something networks are unable to provide." He's personally worked directly with agencies for everyone from VirginAmerica to Starbucks to create unique campaigns that have lead to many more campaigns with their agencies. He points out almost all of the properties similar to his, such as Gawker and Thrillist also have taken a stance about working with any network. This raises a real question -- if the larger networks are having trouble finding quality sites, what does this mean for the sub-tier networks that can't work with even mid-level web properties? It seems in order to compete for a dwindling amount of quality, content driven, targeted properties they would have to take part in using adware and questionable publisher to increase their revenue. Dobkin obviously didn't like networks, but wasn't his group of city based sites ... well ... a network?

These conversations with just a few people in the industry made it very clear where ad networks needed to be focusing. Any network clearly needed to provide a value proposition and many networks that didn't want to be on the record, made it clear to me that they were moving away from being mass reach networks and adding data targeting and other technological additions. However, many of those more sub-tier networks failed to address that they were still doing nothing more than piggybacking on other major networks, or using exchanges to buy inventory cheap and resell at a higher price. It seems the real key to any new network growth has to be in vertical growth, either with companies creating subdivisions that focus on one niche, or new networks coming into being. We often forget that essentially advertising connects consumers with products that interest them. Technology, as great as it can be about targeting people can't address people's real interests and passions, what they really love, what really drives them to get out of bed in the morning in the cold to sit in line for tickets for their favorite country artist, or wait patiently for a day to catch one trout in a stream.The people who run those sites, those who run the vertical ad networks address something that many of us can't really understand unless we are also part of that segment and have a passion for the same thing. No segmentation-pixel or behavior doo-dad can have that conversation. Technology will never replace the conversation.

Publishers: It's Time for an Intervention

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0600

ADAGE - Ad networks aren't killing the publishing industry. Online publishers are using ad networks to kill themselves.

Let me be clear: There's nothing inherently wrong with ad networks -- not even remnant ad networks, those favorite targets of doom-sayers and makers of swine-themed analogies.

There's also nothing innately self-destructive about publishers who use ad networks. In fact, one thing you can say of remnant ad networks is that their intended customers know what they're doing: selling non-premium inventory in volume at commodity prices. It's safe, it's effective, and nobody gets hurt.

The problems start when premium publishers begin to stray. They build their businesses with trusted in-house sales teams and premium networks only to be lured into the remnant market by the promise of a few more dollars. (It's Business 101. You can't play premium and volume at the same time and emerge with your price structure intact.)

You can't deny the appeal -- but at this rate, remnant networks may just be the gateway drug undermining premium brand strategies. It's time to get a hold of ourselves, face up to our problems and take positive steps to lead a healthier lifestyle. Yes, people. It's time for an intervention!

Time for an intervention
"What's wrong with a little dip into the remnant marketplace?" you ask. "I'll only do it on weekends, and I'll know where to draw the line."

Well, the problem is, there's no way to keep your experimentation phase private. Advertisers aren't dumb. They know when your site is in a remnant network or exchange. And as soon as they know they can buy your audience more cheaply on the remnant networks, why wouldn't they? Next thing you know, you're losing direct relationships, your eCPMs are slipping and your brand is fading. But by then it's too late; your CFO is hooked on that fill rate metric -- and it's hard to turn off any revenue stream once it starts flowing.

Now's the time for some tough love. You have to decide what kind of business you're in, and stick with it. If you're going to sell inventory in volume at commodity prices through remnant ad networks, great. Go for it. You can make good money that way.

On the other hand, if your goal is to command high-margin CPMs for premium inventory, then your business -- and your brand -- will only be as strong as your resolve to stick to the straight and narrow. Your new life begins with a six-step program:

Exit your existing ad network and data contracts.
Prepare your company for the transition.
Create unique, premium products like large, high-impact ad units, interstitials and rich media.
Use unsold inventory to promote your premium content and products.
Hire and train sellers to be consultative partners for an advertiser's media plan, not just "smile and dial" sales people.
Extend your own reach to new audiences via outlets that will add shine to your brand, not tarnish it.

No pain, no gain
Whichever way you go, there'll be pain. If you choose the premium brand model, you'll have to take a hit on revenue in the short term because you're cutting off the remnant networks that have been delivering that short-term high. This might not be the most popular decision you've ever made (though your own salespeople will love you for it).

The volume model has its pain points and prices to pay as well. Reorganizing your staff and products around an optimized network-oriented model is a disruptive process, and it's not going to win you any friends on your sales team. Still, the end result may be worth the effort if that is the strategy you're after.

Whether you opt for the premium model or the volume model, your business will benefit from a more conscious, deliberate, and clearly defined strategy. Once you've experienced stable eCPMs and branded campaigns, you'll feel high on life and longevity. What brand doesn't want that?

Targeting Is Not Engagement

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0600

MEDIAPOST - With all the recent talk about targeting and making use of data, our industry is missing something major: Brands need to engage the right audiences, not just reach them.

Let me explain: Advertising data is the hot industry topic these days. Many advertisers believe they can effectively reach increasingly targeted audiences -- if only they can get their hands on the right data. The industry is focused on adding more and more data to demand side platforms (DSP) and using real-time bidding (RTB) to leverage that data. Which is great -- but insufficient. Study after study shows that the best performance for brands comes when they combine premium sites with compelling creative.

Engagement has been pushed to the back burner lately, but it's still critical for brands -- and successful engagement requires concerted efforts that go well beyond data and targeting. You cannot automate quality, creativity and engagement. The online advertising industry does need to make some wholesale changes to adapt to the insights and needs of our sophisticated advertisers. One of those changes is to emphasize what brands are doing to engage (and not just reach) the right audience.

I've heard many advertisers wonder why a brilliantly targeted campaign didn't generate the desired goal of brand lift, increased purchase intent, sales lift, and so on. Although current conventional wisdom is that the campaign would have worked if the targeting was just that much more precise, Dynamic Logic's recent study (covered in Online Media Daily last fall) showed that the single biggest predictor of brand impact was the ad creative itself.

Effective targeting can (of course) help people reach the right audience members, but that first step can give a false sense of confidence. Using data alone misses the value of both context and creative. Data have become a crutch that is, by definition, easier to quantify (and that much easier to justify to the client); yet data are unlikely to be the cure-all catalyst for a campaign that engages consumers.

Think about it this way: targeting identifies people who are likely to be interested in your brand. The offline equivalent would be hand-delivering ads only to the people who are hanging out outside your store or already inside -- they might be good customers but they are certainly not the bulk of your sales prospects. And if you don't have something compelling to say or show to the folks who haven't strolled near your store, they won't be interested.

If you over-rely on targeting, you are limiting yourself. Beyond targeting you need to look at whether your audience finds you memorable. Are they partial to your creative? Are you sparking the curiosity of new prospective customers? Are you building affinity and planting seeds for future purchases?

Then, as an industry there is the deeper issue that if we over-rely on targeting, it will reduce the efficacy of targeting. If everyone buys from the same data providers, then what do you have that's unique? And the more precisely you target, the more likely you are to miss valuable prospective and developing customers who fall outside the bounds of your over-precise targeting.

Context and Creative Matter
Every campaign needs to find a balance between the audience most likely to be interested in the type of goods you sell and serving the right creative to that audience in a context where they are most predisposed to engage with your offering. The media mix should absolutely reach known prospects and customers through targeting, social media and email marketing -- but should also be expanding the universe of prospects through contextually relevant, memorable campaigns. The probability of engagement is so much higher on vertical sites (according to comScore, which found that people reached by vertical ad networks spent at least 60% more time in those site categories) because you are presenting your campaign in a context where the audience is predisposed to be receptive to your message. On vertical ad networks you can broadly target the top of the funnel and begin engaging the audience before you move down the funnel with narrower targeting. Why start with one-to-one marketing (the bottom of the funnel --or the people hanging outside your store front)? You should move there once you've already found audiences willing to engage with your brand.

Brands can't overlook the creative that they deliver in their contextually relevant, targeted campaigns. Interactive marketing veteran Cory Treffiletti, in a recent blog post, implored the industry to, "not bypass creativity completely because creativity is what actually provides us with better access to data and can help us assume the top position for marketing dollars."
Yet when we recently conducted a survey of media planners, we found that a vast majority of agencies don't consider ad networks' creative capabilities as a point of evaluation. That's a problem because creative capabilities stand to make the difference in campaign impact and efficacy -- particularly when creative is served in the highly engaging and contextually relevant environments found on vertical sites.

Both publishers and advertisers have to find the right mix of both reach and engagement to be successful. But you'd be surprised how infrequently that happens. I believe that will change, but we need to start redirecting our focus to engaging audiences, not just reaching them.

Media Contacts Partners With Adify On Custom Networks

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0600

MEDIAPOST - Media Contacts, the interactive media agency of Havas Digital, has named vertical ad network Adify as a preferred ad network for developing custom networks on behalf of clients.

"We are streamlining our business to partner with the best and most strategic partners for our clients," said Ed Montes, managing director, Havas Digital North America, in a statement. "We selected Adify Media as a preferred network because it delivers unmatched quality of audience and transparency."

Adify, a unit of Cox Enterprises, operates more than 200 niche networks, including those run by Six Apart, Pajama Media, the Travel Channel and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. It claims a total audience of more than 109 million and has a proprietary ad-targeting solution to select sites where certain users spend more than 25% of their time.

Media Contacts plans to take advantage of that technology in creating branded networks for clients in the travel, health care and retail sectors beginning in the second quarter and launching one or two each quarter during the rest of the year.

"The big question is can a customized network focused around content deliver higher engagement than another form of targeting, and that's what we're most interested in finding out with this approach," said Adam Kasper, managing director of digital innovation at Media Contacts.

While he would not detail exactly what the networks would entail, they likely feature branded content across individual sites and may include third-party affinity advertising as well like other Adify networks. In gauging the success of these efforts, Kasper said the agency would look more to traditional brand metrics such as awareness and consideration rather than conversions or clicks.

"It's a good thing to have a network focused on these types of upper-funnel metrics because that's the way for digital to gain share of brand budgets," said Kasper. Media Contacts boasts a wide range of major brands including Coca-Cola, Audi, Citibank, Delta and Ikea.

Rather than seeking particular audiences or affluent consumers through Adify, the agency is looking for new ways to engage clients' existing users. "We're partnering on this because we found [Adify's] technology to be of potentially large value and not because they deliver a specific demographic," he said. "Hopefully, they can deliver whatever audiences we need."

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=122621

@OnMedia: The ad network is dead. Long live ad networks.

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0600

Publishers and agencies often have a hate-hate relationship with advertising networks. But as much as ad sellers might hope, it doesn't look like networks are going away any time soon.

In fact, according to Adify study released today, ad network adoption is up 24% since May of 2008. At during "The Future of Ad Exchanges & Networks" panel at the OnMedia conference in New York on Tuesday, it became clear that ad networks are far from dead. And while they may not be called ad networks next year, the technology will continue to exist and thrive.

According to Adify, 69% of media planners and agencies now use online advertising networks as part of their digital ad buys. That's a 24% increase over the past 18 months.

Meanwhile, 56% of respondents’ budgets were more than $500,000 in 2008. 73% were over $500k in 2009. In 2009, 37.9% of those surveyed spend between $1-5 million per quarter on online advertising, 15.2% of respondents spend $5-20 million per quarter, and 5.9% spend more than $20 million per quarter on online advertising.

But that doesn't mean that ad networks can rest on their laurels and wait to rake in cash. According to the OnMedia panel, networks are in danger of becoming outdated.

It used to be that ad networks took in ad dollars and delivered ROI metrics, but as the online advertising ecosystem gets more complicated — and advertisers and publishers become more adept at navigating it — only those ad networks that adapt will survive.

According to Rajeev Goel, Ceo of PubMatic:

"Now we're seeing specialists coming in for each of these different constituents and optimizing for each constituent. All of these networks will have to choose which constituant they want to serve. I think most will choose the advertiser."

"The networks are a critical part of the ecosystem," says Drew Stein, the COO of IMO Entertainment. "Content is all over the place. You need to be able to find people and deliver ad impression no matter where they are. The ability to do that across multiple networks is exciting."

Amiad Solomon, the CEO of Peer39, thinks that for large large publishers, "whatever they can sell directly, they should." But the technology that has been popped up to sell remnant and non-premium advertising is not going anywhere.

Brian O'Kelley, CEO of AppNexus, puts it this way:

"I think it's short sighted to say that networks are going away. They'll be DSPs this year, they'll be another acronym next year. All these pieces of the ecosystem are just getting more sophisticated."

Technologists continue in their efforts to increase the traction and rates at which online inventory is sold. Whether they're called ad exchanges, networks or DSPs, in the end, it still comes back to that age old term: scale.

According to Scott Spencer, Google's Ad Exchange product manager:

"The promise of getting to brand advertising is starting to actually happen. If we can go to an agency and say 'replicate the superbowl audience one for one cheaper and easier,' than we'll be there."

Adify Finds Ad Network Adoption Up by a Quarter

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0600

ADOTAS – The future of ad networks remains murky, but those who believe they’re about to die in numbers should hold off on digging the mass grave and read Adify’s new survey showing that ad network adoption is up 24% in the last 18 months.

With 216 media planners, interactive marketing directors and agency executives responding to its queries, Adify reports that 69% of media planners and agencies are using ad networks as part of their digital buys, compared to 48% recorded in 2008. In addition, vertical ad networks are increasing in notoriety, with 72% of respondents now familiar with the niche services compared to 56% in 2008.

More than two-thirds of respondents cited cost effectiveness as a chief reason for using ad networks. The three most important qualities in ad networks are targeting, transparency and quality, while networks’ creative abilities were the least important attribute.

Adify President Russ Fradin found this most concerning. “As the industry looks for better ways to engage, not just reach, their audience, brands need to focus on compelling creative that builds an ongoing conversation with consumers and placing it where consumers spend time,” he said.

In 2009, 37.9% of those surveyed spent between $1 million to $5 million per quarter on online advertising, while 15.2% of respondents doled out $5 million to $20 million per quarter and 5.9% dropped more than $20 million per quarter. Seventy-three percent of respondent’s digital media budgets were larger than $500,000, compared to 56% in 2008

Branding beat out direct response as the top priority for online campaigns, with 83% of respondents allocating 50% or more of their budget to the cause.

Adify Media Now Ranks Among comScore's Top 20 Ad Networks

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

With 90 Million Unique Visitors and Rapidly Increasing Global Reach, Adify Media Gains Momentum

SAN BRUNO, CA--(Marketwire - October 19, 2009) - Adify Media, a premium online advertising network, has entered the comScore top 20 rankings for U.S. ad networks, according to the latest report issued for September 2009.

According to comScore's Key Measures Report, the Adify Media network had over 90 million unique visitors in the month of September. This figure represents a 61 percent increase in visitors since January 2009. The number of total site visitors has increased 56 percent since January 2009, representing the fastest rate of growth for any ad network listed in the top 20.

Adify Media's unique visitor growth has been fueled by consumers who are spending more time on quality, mid-tail sites that identify with their passions -- the type of sites found in vertical ad networks powered by Adify Network Builder. Adify Media has also seen strong overall business growth, which has been driven by a combination of key executive sales hires, regional sales office expansion and a commitment to providing brand advertisers and media planners with access to engaged, educated, and affluent audiences in the mid-tail.

"Adify Media is a unique player in the ad network market," said Rob Griffin, SVP, U.S. Director, Search, Data and Analytics, Media Contacts. "Adify Media has quality inventory, shows me where my ads are running and offers unique creative abilities to engage my clients' audiences. It's a very differentiated and compelling offering. I am pleased to see Adify Media's success and I look forward to strengthening our relationship."

About Adify Media

Adify Media is the media services division of Adify. Built on the Adify Network Builder platform technology that powers more than 200 vertical ad networks, Adify Media has unique access to over 12,000 sites in networks built by top media companies. Adify Media reaches advertisers' goals by delivering creative and content with 100 percent transparency to quality mid-tail sites.

About Adify

Adify Corporation is a vertical ad network management and media services company that is an independent, wholly owned subsidiary of Cox TMI Inc., part of Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises.

An Uptick for Real Estate Ads Online

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

THE NEW YORK TIMES - The price being charged for a real estate ad in one of online advertising’s two major pricing plans has more than doubled since the last quarter of 2008, according to Adify, an online network builder and ad broker.
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The figures reflect increasing demand by the mortgage, moving, real estate and contracting companies that place ads on Web sites related to real estate. That rise in demand is, in turn, linked to the moderate increase in housing starts over the last quarter.

At the same time, Adify’s data is limited in scope. It reflects only the 12,000 Web sites built on technology hosted by Adify, which tend to be midsize sites with five-figure monthly visitor counts.

Moreover, Adify’s advertisers pay per thousand views of their ads (a system known as C.P.M. for “cost per mille”), rather than paying for each time a user click on their ads (a system known as cost per click).

Adify also reported more moderate rises in rates for sports- and entertainment-related ads. ALEX MINDLIN

Report: Display Ad Market Stabilizing?

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

AdWeek - There are some signs that pricing for display advertising is stabilizing, at least for the Web's long tail.

Adify, a technology firm that helps media companies large and small create and manage online ad networks, has released a report on CPM pricing for display ads. It indicates that some content categories are seeing pricing bounce back slightly since the economy went south late last year.

For example, Adify found that prices for ad inventory on real estate sites doubled during the second quarter of this year compared to the fourth quarter last year, reaching an average of $6.49. Similarly, the sports category's CPM reached $7.09, an increase of 18 percent versus the previous quarter, when prices had dipped. Entertainment CPMs are also on the rise, said company officials.

Though it cannot claim comprehensive insight into pricing trends for the entire display marketplace -- for example, it lacks data from many top publishers as well as the largest portals and search engines -- Adify does have unique visibility into the online advertising ecosystem. The Cox TMI-owned firm manages over 200 networks, representing inventory on 12,000 sites which reach nearly 70 million U.S. users. Those networks range from niche networks like Hello Race Fans Ad Network, which is comprised of horseracing sites and blogs, to Martha's Circle, a collection of lifestyle-oriented sites and blogs that are aligned with Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

Among the 13 vertical ad network categories Adify monitors, the travel, technology, automotive and health categories commanded the highest average CPMs in the second quarter of 2009. Specifically, technology CPMs climbed to $16.01 after a rough first quarter, said officials, while recession-sensitive categories like automotive ($15.33) and travel ($19.89) showed decent pricing growth after slipping during the first quarter of this year.

The current signs are not all positive, however, as Adify's Moms/parents and beauty/fashion verticals both saw pricing declines in the second quarter.

Adify: CPM rates for some display ads show upward trend

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

IAB SmartBrief - Display ads on real estate, entertainment, sports, technology and travel sites are among Adify's 200 niche vertical ad networks that commanded higher CPM rates for the second quarter of this year versus the end of 2008, according to the company. "What it says to us on a broad level is that display ads are still strong and branding is still strong," said Joelle Gropper Kaufman, senior marketing vice president at Adify.

Adify On Vertical Display Market; Google Ad Exchange Commission; Venture Investing In Real-Time

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

AdExchanger.com - The Vertical State of the Display Ad Market

In a piece by MediaWeek's Mike Shields, Adify is reporting that display ad prices are rebounding and names categories such as Real Estate ($6.49 CPMs in Q2, was half that in Q4 2008) and Sports ($7.09 CPM in Q2, +18% from Q1). The highest CPM was in Travel at over $19. Shields notes that there was some weakness, too, in the "parents" and "beauty" verticals.

Adify Report Finds Rising Real Estate CPMs

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

MEDIAPOST - Real estate and sports and entertainment are among the ad categories that are showing a rebound in ad rates in the second quarter after slumping at the end of 2008, according to new data from ad technology company Adify.

Based on pricing across the 200 vertical ad networks and 12,000 sites the company powers, Adify found that average CPMs in the real estate sector had climbed back to $6.50 in the second quarter after falling to just over $3 in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Sports and entertainment CPMs have both increased about 20% since the end of last year, with sports ($7.09 CPM) benefiting from events such as the NCAA tournament, NBA and NHL playoffs and start of the baseball season during the spring. Rates for news-oriented content were also up 20% to a $10 CPM in the last six months, but down from the first quarter when the presidential inauguration temporarily boosted the audience for news.

The median CPM overall across 13 industry sectors in the second quarter was $7.70, with a low of $3.63 and a high of $19.89, according to the Adify Vertical Gauge, a report on CPMs and pricing information that the company plans to release quarterly. It covers premium inventory sold across banner ads, rollovers, roadblocks, sponsorships, and rich media units.

Forbes.com, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, The Guardian and Pajama Media are among the Web publishers that have used Adify to build their own branded networks. The company was acquired last year for $300 million by Cox Enterprises, which uses the platform to help monetize its own publishing properties.

Joelle Kaufman, Adify's senior vice president of marketing, said that with over 4,500 hundred ad buys each day running through its system, the company now has enough data to start issuing quarterly reports about ad rates and trends. "And each buy represents hundreds of thousands to millions of impressions," she said.

Kaufman added that CPM rate fluctuations track the business cycle, especially with real estate. "It's now slightly easier for people to get mortgages, and we're starting to see CPMs reflect the growing demand for that audience and that industry which was somewhat depressed," she said.

It's not time to start celebrating, however. The Commerce Department reported Tuesday that housing starts in July were down 1% from the prior month and that the market for new homes remained weak despite recent signs of increased activity in the housing market.

Declining CPMs in categories such as beauty and fashion and technology in the second quarter also pulled down the overall median rate across all Adify industry verticals. Technology fell to a $16 CPM from $23 in the fourth quarter of 2008, although Kaufman attributed that drop mainly to the IDG Tech Network leaving Adify earlier this year for DoubleClick as its ad-serving partner. But technology still commands among the highest CPMs, along with automotive ($15.33) and travel ($19.89).

Adify says its ad rates reflect the highly targeted and engaged audiences drawn to the niche sites across its platform.

Adify Reports Rising CPMs in Some Categories

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

CLICKZ - If a new report from premium network aggregator Adify is any indication, display CPMs for some key verticals may be staging a comeback.

The company serves ads on a group of 200 niche vertical networks such as DriverTV, Hockey Ad Network, and Real Estate and Living. Its quarterly report, to be released today, says that although its median CPM remained flat since Q1, some positive numbers were posted in the second quarter of this year. That median CPM was $7.71 with a range of $3.63 to $19.89. However, real estate network CPMs grew 100 percent between Q4 2008 and Q2 2009, sports and entertainment prices were up nearly 20 percent, and news-oriented content CPMs commanded over 20 percent growth over Q4 2008. Travel, technology, automotive, and health held onto the highest CPMs for Adify since falling to rock bottom levels in late 2008.

"What it says to us on a broad level is that display ads are still strong and branding is still strong," said Adify senior marketing VP Joelle Gropper Kaufman. "Not everything is going to be spent on search. There's still no silver bullet for Internet marketing and we're excited about these overall trends."

Two things stand out about the Adify numbers. First, they are exponentially higher than some of the more widely reported average CPM figures reported earlier this year, which were measured in cents. Part of that is because Adify's audience is smaller and more targeted than its larger competitors. It ranked 39th in the most recent comScore ad network analysis, with 69 million unique users. Kaufman says the rich media-heavy ads run on Adify have higher CPMs because the networks have stayed with quality content and the publishers within the networks have innovated with ad positions and customer engagement measurements. That innovation, she says, has resulted in the steady CPMs for travel ($19) technology ($16) and automotive ($15).

The second trend worth noting in the numbers is the relationship between inventory and demand. Real estate and sports jumped because advertiser demand for available inventory jumped dramatically. Kaufman's analysis of the real estate category shows that available mortgages, which were almost non-existent in Q4 2008, jumped dramatically in Q2 2009, and mortgage advertising kept pace. Real Estate CPMs, at $6.49 for Q2 have shown the most noteworthy CPM growth.

Sports CPMs were driven by March Madness, baseball fantasy drafts, and the NFL draft, boosting CPMs nearly 20 percent to $7.09. Entertainment was also notable (up 19 percent) since October 2008, in keeping with the "inventory demand" model as the movie industry tends to fare well during recessions.

Up next? The business vertical. "It is growing steadily quarter on quarter which likely reflects continued interest in business news and business analysis," Kaufman said. "The federal bail-out and TARP rescue elevated general interest in business practices and policies. As credit flows more freely, we expect competition for qualified audiences on business sites to drive CPM growth further."

Compete and Ad Impact: What works if not click-throughs?

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

econsultancy - Display advertising is currently suffering from growing pains. Online marketers are digging themselves out of the click-through ghetto, but the best way to measure the effectiveness of display ads online is still unclear.

This week, web measurement firm Compete launched a new service called Ad Impact that tracks what users do after being exposed to online ads.

It gets to a point about the impact of display advertising: if click-through rates aren't working to measure their effectiveness, what will?

Analyzing more than 75 campaigns since the beginning of the year, Compete found display ad exposure increases traffic to marketer sites and boosts brand search.

Ad Impact tracks user behavior in three categories: branded site visitation; search phrases; visits to rival and third-party sites and social media; and campaign profile data including demographic, impression and frequency reporting.

Michael Rucker, product marketing manager, YouTube and Google: "Dozens of our advertising partners take advantage of this research and we have been impressed with the metrics reported. Knowing that your campaign resulted in an exposed audience being 700% more likely to search for your product is information a savvy marketer needs to know, and Ad Impact has allowed us to provide our clients with these insights."

While click-through rates have proved a powerful measure of search advertising, for display they just don't work. Web surfers may not click on display ads the way they click on search, but those ads still have a positive effect for brands.

Last month the Online Publishers Association released a study showing people exposed to 80 brand campaigns on 200 popular sites had a greater likelihood of visiting those brand's sites and searching related terms than those who didn't see them.

Meanwhile, at the end of last year, comScore data from the study "How Online Advertising Works: Whither the Click?" showed that click-through rates don't show what benefits come from brand advertising online.

But the question remains: What does work for display? Compete's new tool helps find useful aggregation of post campaign reach and analysis, but it's still a campaign wide measure.

There are ways of diversifying content to find out what works and where. Marketers can run different ads with different publishers and roll out campaigns slower to see the impact of specific ads on sales. Or to add action items that are specific to particular ads on different sites as a method of tracking.

But this all gets back to the same issue. Measuring brand build, both offline and online, is simply a more difficult process than direct marketing and search. And one that is still being worked out.

According to Joelle Joelle Kaufman, VP of marketing at Adify: "ad effectiveness studies should be part of any branded campaign. I think you're going to see comscore and Nielsen copy this. Marketers want to see a lot more than 'here's my click.'"

Read article here.

Adify Media Ranked a Top US Ad Network According to comScore Online Buying Power Index

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Audience Buying Power, Combined With Global Reach of 90 Million, Proves Adify Media to Be the Most Valuable Ad Network

SAN BRUNO, CA -- June 10, 2009 - Adify, the premier vertical ad network management and media services company, today announced that its media division, Adify Media, the largest transparent, brand-safe global ad network, is one of the top ad networks in terms of audience buying power. According to comScore's Buying Power Index (BPI), the site visitors reached by Adify Media, on average, spend more money online than audiences available on any other large network. This analysis is across Ad Networks at the Ad Network property (corporate) level and not specific channels.

comScore's BPI is a measure of the value of the audience online as it relates to their online buying power and compared to the overall online population. A BPI value over 100 means that a site's visitors spend more online than the average Internet user during the reported time period.

"BPI is the only measure that clearly shows the relative value of a site's visitors based on their buying behavior across the Internet," said Russ Fradin, president and co-founder of Adify. "When you combine our high BPI ranking with our reach, breadth of advertising products, and quality, it's clear that advertisers can engage with the most valuable audience online through Adify Media."

According to the comScore data, Adify Media has a BPI of 149 and an audience of approximately 73 million people in the U.S. Among ad networks, only Federated Media registered a higher BPI (152), but had an audience reach of just 14 million.

The following chart shows comScore data from the top five ad networks with at least 2 million unique visitors, ranked by highest BPI.

Ad Networks - Total (US April 2009)	Total US Unique Visitors	% Reach	BPI
Federated Media Network	14,190	7.4	152
Adify	73,467	38.1	149
Vibrant Media	80,779	41.9	148
Pulse 360	82,574	42.8	146
Kontera	72,870	37.8	145

Adify Media's BPI complements additional comScore data showing that Adify Media audiences are often more engaged, affluent and educated than general audiences:

-- 80 percent are college educated
-- 45 percent have a U.S. household income of $75k
-- 28 percent have a U.S. household income of $100k+

About Adify
Adify Corporation is a vertical ad network management and media services company that is an independent, wholly owned subsidiary of Cox TMI Inc., part of Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises.

Adify Strengthens Sales Leadership to Drive Revenue Growth

Mon, 25 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Media Sales Veterans Glenn Fishback, Lee Hoffman, and Jonny Byrne Join Adify Media

SAN BRUNO, Calif. – (May 25, 2009) – Adify, the premier vertical ad network management and media services company, today announced the appointments of Glenn Fishback, SVP media sales, Lee Hoffman, VP media sales, eastern region, and Jonny Byrne, commercial director, UK to build out the sales team for Adify’s new division, Adify Media. Adify Media (www.adifymedia.com), the media marketplace for brand advertisers, sells inventory across 180 Adify Network Builder-powered vertical ad networks and provides the world’s largest transparent, brand-safe global ad network. Collectively, Fishback, Hoffman, and Byrne bring nearly 60 years of media and sales leadership experience to Adify Media.

Fishback was previously the VP of sales at Turn Inc., where he became the company’s first sales executive and successfully grew the media business to a substantial run rate in just two years. He also held VP of sales positions at Coupons Inc. and Claria Corporation, including management of revenue growth in the U.S., Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. In his new role at Adify Media, Fishback will oversee all U.S. media sales, manage key agency and advertiser accounts, and maintain relationships with media teams across Cox Media companies and Adify internationally.

“In today’s competitive marketplace, Adify Media has created a unique and differentiated alternative for brand advertisers. No other media provider today can offer site by site transparency and performance visibility, brand safety, and targeting efficiency all under one roof,” said Fishback. “We are the only company that can deliver these benefits plus integrated online and offline media buys through all the companies of COX Enterprises. Adify Media is really what an ad network should be and I am thrilled to be part of this new initiative.”

Hoffman joins Adify Media from AOL’s ad network, Platform-A, where he was a regional sales director managing over $50m in revenue. His career includes VP-level sales positions at WebMD, Ask Jeeves, MaxOnline, and MaxWorldwide (formerly L90/Doubleclick North American Media). In his new role at Adify Media, Hoffman will lead Adify’s New York office and drive media sales for the eastern and midwestern U.S.

Byrne comes to Adify from Tiscali UK Ltd, where he was head of agency sales and ran the media sales team responsible for generating in excess of £7m net sales PA. He was sales manager and key account director at Incisive Media (formally VNU Business Publications), and led the international team providing cross-media solutions for Europe’s top 20 corporate tech clients. In his new role as commercial director, Byrne will lead Adify Media’s London office, overseeing UK media sales.

“Glenn Fishback, Lee Hoffman, and Jonny Byrne are known leaders who bring a wealth of experience to the Adify Media team,” said Russ Fradin, president of Adify. “As we ramp up our media business, I am confident that we have the strongest team in place to build it up. Glenn has already hit the ground running in securing exceptional leaders and ensuring that every advertiser and agency will be well-served by professional, knowledgeable, industry veterans.”

Adify Media complements the Adify Network Builder solution by giving advertisers an alternate means to target and segment the highly engaged audiences of the publishers on Adify Network Builder-powered vertical ad networks. Adify Media delivers 73MM US unique visitors across high-value vertical segments, of which six out of 10 deliver greater unique reach than their comparable portal competitors. The Adify Media audience over-indexes Internet averages in many areas: 80% of Adify Media visitors have attended some college and 56% are graduates; in Gaming, Adify Media visitors spend nearly twice as much time online on games and entertainment compared to average Internet users; and in the Moms/Parents segment, Adify Media viewers are 74% more like to spend $500+ on children’s clothing. (Source: comScore, March 2009)

About Adify Media

Adify Media is the media services branch of Adify, Corp. Built on the Adify Network Builder platform technology that powers more than 180 vertical ad networks, Adify Media has direct relationships with over 12,000 proprietary sites and their highly engaged audiences. For each campaign Adify Media creates custom site lists, offers unparalleled customer support, and delivers site-by-site and line-item reporting for complete transparency.

About Adify

Adify Corp., the premier vertical ad network management and media services company, is an independent, wholly owned subsidiary of Cox TMI Inc., part of Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises, one of the nation's leading media companies.

Press Contact:
Anthony Laredo
Horn Group, Inc.
(646) 202-9770

Adify: Everything Is Hunky Dory In Online Advertising

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500

SILICON VALLEY WATCHER - Russ Fradin says the online advertising industry is doing well and growing -- it's certainly not a shrinking medium even though some reports of falling ad rates might indicate problems.

Mr Fradin is CEO of Adify, a large advertising network that was acquired by Cox Enterprises about a year ago. Its a platform for building smaller ad networks focused on "vertical" content such as iVillage - which caters to women. Here are some notes from our conversation:

I mentioned Nick Denton of Gawker saying that the micropublishing dream is dead. Mr Fradin disagreed, saying that "it was never going to happen." The idea that bloggers running niche sites would be getting rich was a fantasy. He thinks that micropublishing will gradually become more profitable but no one is going to be selling their blogs and retiring.
Every online ad network continues to do well despite the economy because there are still a lot of ad budgets shifting online from radio, television and newspapers.
There wasn't much of interest at the recent AdTech conference in San Francisco except that advertising agencies are wondering what role they will play in the online world.
There is a tremendous amount of content online and more coming online all the time, this appears to dilute online advertising dollars. This fragmentation is increasing and that's what makes it difficult for media companies to make money because there is so much competition. Fragmentation is destroying media. Ad networks provide value because they aggregate content for advertisers.
Won't there be a shakeout on the content side I asked? No, there will always be people willing to create the content for little money because they have a day job.
Politico is a good example of a media company that is doing well. It is syndicating its content along with its own advertising network and sharing the revenues with newspapers. Newspapers are able to shut their Washington bureaus and use Politico content instead.
Social networks won't find a magic formula to boost their CPM rates but they can still be very lucrative because they can serve up trillions of pages.
Adify is nearing signing up 200 vertical ad networks.
Federated Media seems to be turning into a social media ad agency.
Cox has been a great owner, very nice people. It lets Adify do its job. Adify is growing and hiring lots of engineer in UI and back-end operations.

The media planning fight is not over

Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500

ADOTAS — Is traditional media planning becoming obsolete in the age of data and targeting algorithms? That depends on whom you ask.

In Ad Age’s recent article, “What to Expect from the Next Gen of Digital Display,” Rich Karpinski portrays a Wild West-style land grab afoot. Mr. Karpinski sees ad networks, agencies, publishers, and brokers staking out each other’s traditional stomping grounds and jostling each other aside in the effort to take up new territory. Reinforcing the idea that roles are in flux, some networks are predicting that their targeting capacity will increasingly supplant agencies’ planning function.

Both of these visions for “what comes next” show how networks have been successfully moving in on media planning—traditionally an agency strong suit. But don’t count agencies out just yet. .
When it comes to successful planning, agencies still play a critical role that targeting algorithms can’t touch

Certainly, in the current landscape, agencies need to maintain flexibility to operate their businesses – from planning, to day to day operations, to sourcing inventory, to utilizing data – while always balancing value and quality. Partnerships based on total transparency and data ownership may drive us to view inventory as anything from a commodity to a high-value relationship.

Here’s where agencies still have much to offer: While networks offer mass reach, traditional media planners can offer a nuanced evaluation of sites’ content, design, and placement. Savvy brand managers understand that this sort of critical evaluation of context can make the difference between a campaign’s success and a nightmare story of targeting gone wrong. When they collaborate with vertical ad networks, or even form their own vertical ad networks, agencies can deliver relevance as measured by real people—not just their numerical stand-ins.

As Jack Rotolo says in Mr. Karpinski’s piece:

“Content remains one of the more critical factors advertisers evaluate in looking to place their ads; they want to be in contextually relevant areas… Clearly, some advertisers are looking for performance-based advertising. But there’s a whole other arena of advertisers that are really trying to align themselves and create a market position around a brand. They are very selective about the types of environments they are going to get into.”

To date the online world has had a certain amount of disregard for traditional offline branding strategies, but that will soon have to change as well. I predict brands will begin to fight back by building out their own networks within their categories and mining revenue from inventory they are currently ceding to outside players. Karpinski and others seem to agree, noting that “[new] ‘demand-side’ networks run by the large ad holding companies/agencies — VivaKi’s Audience on Demand or Havas’s Adnetik, among others — are emerging to assert the power of the buy-side…”

As offline brands start to take Internet advertising more seriously, we will see an even greater need to build out more integrated and high-value marketing strategies that require brand safety, quality content, and guarantees of contextual relevance. Data-based targeting will continue to expand, but traditional media planning will continue to be of value.

Vertical Ad Network Update

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

CLICKZ - If you thought vertical ad networks were a fad fated to founder next to their more general counterparts, a new comScore research report will have you tipping your hat to these industry newcomers.

According to a study of vertical networks -- in essence subject-specific ad resellers -- their collective reach has increased over the past year from 21.5 percent to over 57 percent. Whereas in March 2008, vertical networks reached 40.3 million unique visitors in the U.S., that number ballooned to 109.8 million in March 2009.

Additionally, vertical ad networks were found to be effective at reaching Internet users with "significantly higher than average engagement" in their preferred content category (e.g., gaming, entertainment, and health), with consumers spending at least 60 percent more time interacting with that category than the average site visitor.

What's responsible for this increased reach and engagement? The vertical network space owes its newfound fame in part to new partnerships and new technologies that secure new users and improve business operations.

In January, MTV Networks (MTVN) introduced a comedy-themed Tribe, its term for its collection of vertical networks. The new Tribe includes sites like Comedy Central, JibJab, and Fark.com. This month, automotive research site AutoTrader.com launched a vertical network called AutoTrader.com Access that's intended to reach in-market car buyers on related category sites.

Also assisting vertical networks in keeping their growth momentum going strong is the wide release of Google subsidiary DoubleClick's Network Builder. The tool is designed for building and managing ad networks. In addition to integrating core DoubleClick products, like DART for Publishers (DFP), it provides a partner portal where site partners can directly access their sites' performance and reporting data. Plus it simplifies financial reporting and partner payouts.

Vertical networks are in no small part affected by the news that vertical ad network platform Adify Corp. -- which many vertical networks, including AutoTrader Access, employ -- has launched a product that's meant to simplify cross-network buys for agencies and advertisers. The new Adify Media service consolidates the over 150 vertical networks using the Adify Network Builder platform to create private marketplaces for advertisers and a customized and specialized media buy.

Whereas vertical networks for such content categories as travel, technology, beauty and environmentally conscious living already exist, there's still space for newcomers if they pick a popular genre. One to watch is Gourmet Ads, another Adify partner that launched in July 2008. The gourmet food, wine, and beer network was created by Benjamin Christie, an Australian celebrity chef who also has his own popular food site and blog (look for him on Twitter at @gourmetads, too). The network started targeting U.S. sites in January and is up to 33 million monthly American page views and 42 million page views globally. Gourmet Ads will launch additional BBQ and coffee verticals to further entice advertisers searching for food-loving home cooks and wine drinkers who purchase quality cookware and appliances, drink wine with dinner, and visit wineries several times each year.

Established vertical networks are, of course, doing their part to boost reach and readership. Top women's network Glam Media launched Glam Family last year and has since added womensforum.com. Tech-themed network NetShelter Technology Media, now with 90 million unique monthly visitors worldwide, ranked fourth last year among the fastest growing sites. Its growth can be attributed to efforts like Top Tech Gifts and Last Gadget Standing, two microsites the network built to leverage the expertise of editors from numerous sites within the NetShelter network.

Despite talk of the network space being too oversaturated to support such content-specific advertising businesses, vertical ad networks continue to demonstrate their value by exhibiting their massive reach. Keep an eye on the big ones and watch for new offerings to emerge in the year to come.

Adify Rolls Out Centralized Ad Network

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

CLICKZ - For a little over a year, vertical ad network platform Adify has operated a centralized sales team to broker inventory for those of its network customers who want the service. Now the company is formalizing its ad network offering with the creation of a unit, called Adify Media, that will offer a menu of individual site placements bundled with online properties owned by its parent company, Cox Enterprises.

The combined reach of the ad network will approach 90 million uniques, approximately 17 million of which will be attributable to Cox's own sites, according to ComScore.

Adify Media prides itself on its dedication to transparency for both buyer and seller. None of its inventory is offered on a blind basis, and its network partners -- whom it calls network builders -- are free to opt out of individual campaigns or the network as a whole. When its six regional ad sellers are dealing with a client, Adify does not mention the names of individual networks using its platform, so as to avoid channel conflict, focusing instead on the properties themselves.

For advertisers, Adify emphasizes highly customized ad packages and site-by-site deliverability reporting. Its reporting data can be viewed by ad space, line item, creative execution or ad size.

"I don't think there's another aggregator that offers anywhere near that level of pipeline visibility, handholding consulting, and the ability to opt in or out at granular levels," said Joelle Gropper Kauffman, Adify's SVP of marketing and corporate partnerships. "For us it's all about people staying in control of their assets and their inventory."

Adify Media is offering a degree of creative variation in its menu of ad formats. According to Gropper Kauffman, Adify is the primary ad server for many sites offered by its media team. Therefore, she noted, "we can do things you just don't do with a network." For instance, she said available formats could include expandable ads, sponsorships, roadblocks, and interstitial video. Standard targeting options will include geographic, behavioral, and browser-based delivery.

Key to Adify Media's pitch is the supposition that mid-tail publishers of the sort that define its network have more engaged audiences than do major portals and ad networks. Its 160 network partners cover topic areas such as politics (Politico Network), lifestyle (Martha's Circle), and food (GourmetAds).

Adify employs sales reps in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Its team, led by general manager Rodney Mayers, has already sold campaigns to Best Western Hotels, Febreze, HP, and Microsoft, among others.

Adify Offers Horizontal Buys Across Vertical Networks

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

MEDIAPOST - Adify, which powers more than 160 vertical ad networks, is now allowing advertisers to buy media across those networks as well as sister Cox Media online properties.

The new Adify Media business lets marketers target specific audiences across the 10,000 niche sites in its vertical networks based on criteria such as content and genre, demography, location and behavioral factors. Within its audience of 69 million U.S. monthly visitors, San Bruno, Calif.-based Adify says 80% are college-educated, 45% have incomes over $75,000 and 28%, over $100,000.

Publishers that have partnered with Adify to create ad networks include Politico, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Warner Bros., NBC Universal and Break Media.

Among the initial group of advertisers to use Adify Media are Best Western Hotels, Eukanuba, Febreze, HP, Microsoft and Can-Am Spyder roadster.

Joelle Kaufman, vice president of marketing at Adify, said the company handles ad-serving itself and gives advertisers the ability to review individual site information by ad space, line item, creative or ad size and to manage campaign data in a single dashboard. "We give advertisers complete transparency," she said.

She added that CPMs typically range from $2 to $20 depending on the type of ad format and how highly targeted the campaign is. In addition to standard IAB formats, Adify Media also offers video overlays, content sponsorships and roadblocks, widget advertising and pay-per-click units.

The new initiative extends to Cox properties as the media giant acquired Adify last year for $300 million. Specifically, it includes Cox Media Group, encompassing its broadcasting and newspaper digital services, and the cable systems and broadband services as well as AutoTrader.com, grouped within Cox Communications.

In a study released Monday, comScore found that the collective reach of vertical ad networks such as Adify and Federated Media has grown dramatically in the last year, to 57.1% of the U.S. Internet audience in March from 21.5% a year ago.

"As more vertical ad networks prove their ability to effectively reach specific target audiences by aggregating mid-tail publisher sites, the industry will likely give greater consideration to these emerging ad delivery channels," said Lesle Litton, vice president of media at comScore, in a statement.

Cox Enterprises' ad network software services provider Adify unveils a unified media marketplace

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

CYNOPSIS DIGITAL - Cox Enterprises' ad network software services provider Adify unveils a unified media marketplace today, enabling advertisers make one buy across all 160 of the company's vertical ad networks along with several Cox online properties including Cox Communications sites and AutoTrader.com. The solution delivers IAB-approved formats with a variety of services including content syndication and widget advertising, brand Performance pay-per-interaction ad units and behavioral and contextual targeting.

Adify Media Launches to Give Brands Unprecedented Access to Adify-Powered Networks and Cox Media Properties

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Adify Media Gives Advertisers Customized, Private Marketplaces that Minimize Waste, Maximize Accountability and Offer Targeted Access To More Than 89 Million Users

Recent comScore Research Shows Adify Media Audiences are Often More Engaged, Educated and Affluent than Portal Audiences

SAN BRUNO, CA, April 28, 2009 — Adify, the premier provider of vertical ad network management solutions, today announced the creation of Adify Media, the largest transparent, brand-safe global ad network that gives advertisers private marketplaces for their campaigns. Adify Media reaches across the vertical ad networks that use Adify Network Builder as well as several Cox media properties to give advertisers and media planners unprecedented and highly customized access to engaged, educated and affluent audiences. Adify Media has already created private marketplaces for top marketers such as Best Western Hotels, Eukanuba, Febreze, HP, Microsoft and Can-Am Spyder roadster.

Adify now offers two distinct and complementary lines of business – Adify Network Builder and Adify Media. Adify Network Builder provides Global 100 Media Companies, entrepreneurs, advertisers and quality independent publishers the comprehensive tools and support services to create vertical ad networks that reach highly engaged audiences. Adify Media delivers opt-in supplemental media revenues for Adify Network Builder customers to maximize the value they generate from online advertising.

Adify Media creates private marketplaces that provide the visibility and reporting today’s brand advertisers need from their network advertising efforts. Adify Media combines the reach of the more than 160 vertical ad networks powered by Adify with access to Cox Enterprise properties, including Cox Media Group (its broadcasting and newspaper digital services), Cox Communications (its multiple cable systems and broadband services) and AutoTrader.com.

Adify Media’s audience is affluent, educated and engaged, and provides the perfect environment for brand advertisers to be seen. The combined reach of the 160 vertical ad networks available to Adify Media provides targeted access to more than 89 million people worldwide and 69 million in the US, through more than ten thousand categorized sites.

Adify Media’s combination of human categorization and ad-targeting technology ensures that media planners get a customized marketplace of relevant sites that are tailored specifically to their campaign. Advertisers have unprecedented access to premium inventory with real-time visibility into where audiences are most engaged. The result is highly effective campaigns with less waste, more accountability and better performance.

Targeting Large and Engaged Audiences on Premium Sites
According to research conducted by comScore, Adify Media’s audiences often exceed targeted portal audiences across online content categories in terms of audience size, length of engagement, level of education, and affluence. For example, the Affluent segment on the Adify network of sites (defined as people who are largely between the ages of 25-54; 31 percent of whom have household incomes of more than $100,000; and regularly visit financial and travel sites) is nearly twice the size of affluent visitors to Yahoo! Finance and AOL Money & Finance, and spends nearly twice as much time on Adify’s affluent sites than portal finance sites. Within the Adify audience at large,

•    80 percent are college educated
•    45 percent have a U.S. household income of $75k
•    28 percent have a U.S. household income of $100k+

Rodney Mayers, GM of Adify Media, sees the combination of Cox's high quality, geo-targeted inventory with Adify's quality mid-tail inventory as very powerful for brand advertisers that are still on the fence about advertising with networks. “Together with Cox, we have access to sites and inventory where more and more of today’s online population spends their time. We’ve made it easy for advertisers to carefully target the audiences that are most important to them by aggregating these audiences across vertical categories based on similar audience characteristics and/or geographies. By providing them with complete visibility and backing that up with third party verification of ad placement, the Adify Media solution sets the bar for what online ad networks should be delivering. There are no blind ad buys here.”

Adify is the primary ad server for all of the sites in Networks powered by Adify, which are hand-vetted (our human algorithm) down to the subdomain level for content quality, context, and brand safety. Editors from major media partners, such as Warner Brothers, NBC Universal, POLITICO and Break Media, and subject matter experts within their respective vertical category provide high-touch selection of content that ensures an appropriate environment for brands to connect with relevant, engaged consumers. Every network using Adify Network Builder can opt-in to Adify Media on a campaign-by-campaign basis.

“Adify's vertical ad networks give us brand-safe tactics to target audiences based on specific site genre and content,” said Sarah Zielie, Sr. Digital Media Specialist at PERISCOPE.

More Accountability, Less Waste
comScore recently shared the results of 8 ad effectiveness studies in the consumer package goods industry, which showed that only 2-20 percent of the ad impressions served hit their intended target with the desired frequency. In other words, at least 80 percent of the advertiser spend did not accomplish its objective.

Adify Media reduces waste by providing buying efficiency for brand advertisers with full visibility and transparency into single-subject, categorized sites where audiences are most engaged. The characteristics of audiences on these sites share significant similarities – more so than the sites within broader ad networks or portals. As the primary ad server for these sites, Adify Media delivers rich-media campaigns including sponsorships, roadblocks, content syndication, in-person video and more.

Because Adify Media is fully transparent, advertisers receive site-by-site data in-flight by ad space, line item, creative or ad size to manage all of the campaign data in one place.

Advertising Technology Innovation
Adify Media leverages purpose-built technology and an open partner ecosystem to deliver a variety of ad products and services. Adify Media delivers all standard IAB formats and offers high impact creative delivery including:

•    Sponsorships and roadblocks
•    Content syndication and widget advertising
•    Video overlays
•    Brand Performance pay-per-interaction ad units
•    Behavioral and contextual targeting
•    Site-by-site real-time reporting and optimization
•    Site-by-site post-impression and post-click optimization

For example, Febreze by P&G worked with Adify technology partner Rovion to target their core audiences via an interactive display ad that complemented the IAB Standard Banners running across the Febreze site list created by Adify Media planners.

“Through Adify Media, we’re giving advertisers accountability showing the impression and performance they achieve with every dollar they spend,” said Russ Fradin, president of Adify. “In addition, Adify Media helps our Network Builders increase the value of membership in their network through fulfillment of more publisher inventory with quality, attractively priced advertising campaigns.”

About Adify
Adify Corporation is a vertical ad network management and media services company that is an independent, wholly owned subsidiary of Cox TMI Inc., part of Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises.

comScore Study Highlights Rapid Emergence of Vertical Ad Networks for Reaching Engaged, Targeted Audiences

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

RESTON, VA, April 27, 2009 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world today released the results of a study of vertical ad networks, which target ads to specific audiences online according to demographic or category content.

Vertical ad networks include entities such as Adify Media, Federated Media, Glam Media and Travel Ad Network, among numerous others. The study showed that the collective reach of vertical ad networks tracked by comScore has increased substantially in the past year, from 21.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience in March 2008 to 57.1 percent in March 2009.

“comScore research indicates that vertical ad networks are a growing phenomenon in the online advertising space, in part because of their ability to deliver engaged, targeted audiences,” said Lesle Litton, VP, Media at comScore. “As more vertical ad networks prove their ability to effectively reach specific target audiences by aggregating mid-tail publisher sites, the industry will likely give greater consideration to these emerging ad delivery channels.”

People Reached by Vertical Ad Networks Exhibit High Category Engagement

The study showed that vertical ad networks were effective in reaching people with significantly higher than average engagement in their respective content categories. Of the five segments studied, people reached by vertical ad networks spent at least 60 percent more time in those site categories than the average category visitor. For example, people reached in the Gaming segment spent 423 minutes per visitor on sites in that category, 123 percent higher than the average visitor.

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital marketing intelligence. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

A Pricing Revolution May Loom, But Context And Content Still Rule

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

MEDIAPOST - There is much discussion about how a pricing revolution is looming in online advertising. Behavioral targeting and demographic profiling have the potential to drive ad revenues down, potentially hurting Web publishers. However, online publishers aren't out of the game yet and here's why.

Lower-costs seem appealing in the post-recession world, but short-term savings are short-sighted. For advertisers who care about brands, these issues have to balance against cost considerations:

• Context: For publishers, there is significant value to be gained from proving and delivering the audience sought by the advertiser. Putting a great ad on low rent inventory reduces the value of your brand -- even if the audience is right. People put offers in context and you want yours to be spot on. This is why a vertical ad network makes more sense for advertisers: publishers and subject matter experts are more reliable judges of quality context than any computer algorithm on its own.

• Latency: We are a long way off from individual targeting in real-time. Neither comScore nor Quantcast can offer that. And retargeting from within ads, while possible, does not ensure that the viewer being cookied fits the desired profile. Now you are pursuing someone for no confirmed reason.

• Coverage: Most data sources can only confirm about 20-40% of the impressions as fitting a particular profile. Data experts then use statistics to gross up to 100%. It's not clear that this more accurate than trusting real editors to judge context and quality.

• High Impact Advertising: The best advertising makes an impression because it's in context and it's entertaining. Large publishers and vertical ad networks are uniquely capable of delivering breakthrough advertising such as roadblocks, overlays, widgets and videos, in a personally vetted context that will resonate with your audience.

To avoid a severe case of being penny wise, but pound foolish, here's a wiser approach for advertisers:

1. Focus in on quality content -- especially the niche independent publishers where educated and affluent Web visitors seek out information about their interests and passions. Those are the sites that can be reached through vertical ad networks.

2. Add retargeting on those quality content sites, where you can accurately assess the demographics of those sites visitors better than through individual impressions alone.

3. Retarget the community of visitors you want, but be careful as you select the outlets where your retargeted ads will display.

4. To ensure that you optimize your campaign to the audience (rather than the click) insist on site- and line-item-transparency, as well as post-campaign (or mid-campaign) demographics reports.

A word to the wise: over-relying on $3 retargeting can damage your precious brand in the long-term, in the interest of a short-term burst of clicks. That's a price you don't want to pay.

Cox Gets Into Ad Network Business

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Media Company Launching Adify Media

ADAGE - Now we know a bit more about why Cox Enterprises, a private holder of cable systems, TV stations and newspapers, spent $300 million last summer to buy Adify.

Hint: Cox wanted a really big online ad network.

Some background: Adify is not an ad network but it is part of the reason everyone seems to have an ad network these days. It's a software services company that allows media companies -- or anyone, really -- to sign up websites and launch an ad network on the cheap.

Over the past few years literally hundreds of such networks have launched, including 160 powered by Adify, including some big-name vertical networks such as Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia's Martha's Circle, NBC Universal and Travel Channel's Flight Deck.

Well, it turns out even Martha Stewart can't move all the inventory on her ad network, so Cox is going to try to do it for them. Cox is launching Adify Media, which will sell that inventory along with Cox's owned properties such as Autotrader and Cox local TV stations.

It's a meta-network, but a potentially big one and a way for Cox to back into the mass internet advertising business. Its 69 million unique visitors lands it in ComScore's top 50 ad networks. "It provided a platform to work with existing Cox divisions, and also gave us a growth path outside our divisions into another industry," explains Rodney Mayer, a former Cox exec who is now general manager of Adify Media.

An ad network is only as good as its inventory, but Mr. Mayer argues that the sites have already been vetted by network operators and were selected in the first place for the quality of their content and audiences.

"Visitors are more engaged on these small niche sites," said Adify VP Joelle Kaufman. "People spend more time there, they are more engaged there. Finding them is not an insignificant task."

AutoTrader.com Launches Network to Help Advertisers Reach Largest Possible Audience

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

ATLANTA — In order to broaden the spectrum of audiences that auto marketers can reach, AutoTrader.com announced the launch a new ad network that includes a vast array of online Web sites.

These sites include AskPatty.com, NADAGuides.com, AutoMart.com, TopGear.com, Care2.com, Greencar.com and other sites representing more than 40 local media properties owned by Cox Media Group and Cox Communications.

Basically, the new program called AutoTrader.com Access can allow advertisers to target shoppers by their individual demographics, interests, online behaviors and location.

In other words, advertisers can use this network of sites — through one media buy — to reach the largest possible audience for their particular product.

"With this network, a maker of a fuel-efficient car, for instance, can advertise on
AutoTrader.com to generate brand exposure to in-market shoppers and, through the Access network, can target eco-conscious shoppers on specific environmentalist sites, sites aimed at specific geographies and more on a national or local level," shared Anne Steinhauer, AutoTrader.com's vice president of national accounts.

"AutoTrader.com brings the in-market shopper," she added. "AutoTrader Access brings branding and awareness to people beyond automotive Web sites."

According to officials, AutoTrader.com Access is powered by Adify for Networks, which is a vertical ad network platform. Adify provides such services as ad management, trafficking, optimization, reporting, payment and technical-support functions.

Utilizing Adify allows AutoTrader.com Access to offer standard and breakthrough banner advertising, behavioral targeting, syndicated content, in addition to video and rich media advertising.

"As one of the top sites for in-market car buyers, AutoTrader.com's visitors — who spend an average of 30 minutes a month on our site — are a highly engaged, attractive audience for companies trying to influence car purchase decisions," Steinhauer noted.

"By creating this network, AutoTrader.com can efficiently deliver our own highly engaged audience and, through the network, the highly targeted audiences that our advertisers also want to reach," she continued.

For more information, e-mail
access@autotrader.com or call (888) 707-7836.

FT.com in deal with Adify

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

LONDON - The Financial Times has teamed up with ad network firm Adify to give its advertisers exposure across relevant small and medium-sized partner websites.

Adify, which already has agreements in place with 140 publishers worldwide, including Guardian.co.uk and Reuters, has been trialling campaigns for FT clients with brands including Royal Mail.

Adify will provide the FT with the technology to enable advertisers to reach SMEs via niche partner websites.

Jon Slade, the Financial Times' global online and strategic advertising sales director, said: "The FT partner sites proposition will allow clients to tap into a larger targeted audience in popular niches, complementing the inventory that already exists on FT.com."

"Audiences are becoming increasingly fragmented online and our clients will now benefit from being able to quickly access inventory on smaller specialist websites, hand-selected by the FT, via a single point of contact."

AutoTrader.com Rolls Out Vertical Ad Network

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

MEDIAPOST - AutoTrader.com has launched a vertical ad network dubbed AutoTrader.com Access aimed at allowing advertisers to target in-market car buyers even when they're not browsing auto-focused sites.

To that end, the new ad network powered by Adify includes not just AutoTrader.com and other car sites but those in related categories including locally focused, environmental, sports, outdoor, and eventually luxury and women-oriented Web properties.

"The idea is finding consumers in the market for cars as they go about the rest of their online media consumption," said Anne Steinhauer, vice president of national accounts at Atlanta-based AutoTrader.com. A key to that effort is retargeting AutoTrader.com's 16 million monthly unique visitors with auto ads when they pop up on other sites. In addition to behavioral targeting, the platform lets advertisers segment consumers demographically and geographically.

Steinhauer said a fuel-efficient carmaker, for example, could advertise on AutoTrader.com to reach in-market shoppers, and through the Access network could target eco-conscious buyers on specific environmental sites or others tied to a particular region.

So far the network spans 170 sites including auto sites such as AskPatty.com, NADAGuides.com, AutoMart.com, TopGear.com, Care2.com and Greencar.com. A common thread throughout the initiative is Cox Media Enterprises, which through subsidiaries owns AutoTrader.com, ad network-building company Adify, and 40 local TV, radio and other media sites that are part of the Access network.

AutoTrader.com sees a natural fit between those sites and the 20,000 local auto dealers it already works with as an extension of their advertising on the company's general market site. The advantage of launching the ad network with a national sales force already in place has quickly become evident, according to Joelle Kaufman, vice president of marketing and corporate partnerships, at Adify.

"We've never seen a network come out of the gate with such strong sales," said Kaufman, whose company provides the back-end technology for 162 vertical ad networks to date.

Auto ad spending online increased only slightly in 2008, from $2.5 billion to $2.8 billion, according the most recent IAB/ PricewaterhouseCoopers Internet ad report, as the industry overall was hit hard by the credit crisis and slumping car sales.

While acknowledging the impact of the downturn on the auto market, Steinhauer said AutoTrader.com has seen an uptick in advertising in the first quarter of 2009 after a period of retrenchment at the end of last year. The site has also added 2 million of its 16 million visitors in just the last two months.

Earlier this year, Cox consolidated most of its print automotive publishing operations into AutoTrader.com.

AutoTrader unveils ad network AutoTrader.com Access

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

ADOTAS — Even with a declining US auto industry, car companies still need to reach people who still want and need a car at a good price.

One player, AutoTrader, is aggressively marketing it. The automotive marketplace has launched AutoTrader.com Access, an ad network that allows advertisers to effectively and efficiently reach in-market car shoppers. With more than 15 million unique monthly visitors to AutoTrader.com as well as loyal audiences from auto-enthusiast and lifestyle sites, AutoTrader.com Access provides the opportunity to target shoppers by demographic, behavioral and geographic characteristics of interest to automotive advertisers.

AutoTrader.com Access aggregates a portfolio of sites to give AutoTrader.com’s advertisers reach to car shoppers through one media buy across multiple publishers. AutoTrader.com Access network publishers include AskPatty.com, NADAGuides.com, AutoMart.com, TopGear.com, Care2.com, Greencar.com and web sites of more than 40 local media properties owned by Cox Media Group and Cox Communications.

AutoTrader.com’s advertising network is powered by Adify for Networks, a vertical ad network platform and service.

Exchanges put pressure on cheapest ad networks

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500

ADOTAS — I was talking to Joelle Gropper Kaufman, Adify’s SVP for marketing and corporate partnerships, yesterday and asked her about the idea that ad exchanges would replace ad networks:

For the ad networks that are going for cheap, broad reach, ad exchanges made it much more efficient, she said. The risk is if that ad network isn’t adding an value on top of that. At some point the media buyers will just go to the exchange themselves, because why pay a margin to someone who is not adding value, she added.

She said there are two reasons there are tons of ad networks, one is because of Adify (she is head of marketing). There are at least 150 vertical ad networks that did not exist three years ago. Now they do because of Adify. “We think they are good for advertisers. Advertisers think they are good for them, and they are highly segmented.” Advertisers don’t care about all 150, they care about say three of them, and they are happy the ad networks exist.

The other reason there are another 100 ad networks is because of ad exchanges. They made it very easy for people to create an ad network and rapidly aggregrate unsold inventory, cheaply. They want to find the cheapest inventory that will possibly perform, ad exchanges made that so much more efficient “as long as you don’t care what the inventory is.”

The challenge is media buyers are not stupid. They are asking what value is the ad network bringing? “That’s where a lot of networks that are just buying on exchanges are going to have hard time. And there is pressure on them and that has nothing to do with networks that are vertical ad networks” or networks that have their own relationships with publishers or have their own technology or tracking and they don’t broker. But they are more expensive, she said.

Ad exchanges are putting pressure on the cheapest ad networks - but only the cheapest the ad networks. “Because there is only so much you can do in an exchange and the media buyers do not have time to vet and inspect all the different content that is coming on an exchange.”

Adify have had advertisers tell them stories about ads showing up on questionable sites, she said. “It turned out it didn’t feel questionable to the technology of that exchange that someone else bought it on. There is no contest between a human and a machine when determining context. Every time the human is going to win.”

comScore Scrutinizes Faulty Online Ad Operations

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Recent research by comScore indicates that just a fraction of campaign impressions reach their intended audience with the desired frequency, reports ClickZ.

Out of eight US brand campaigns with budgets between $400,000 and $2 million, not one reached more than 20% of their target with a frequency of four impressions or less.

And even those with over 4 impressions failed to hit the 40% mark for on-target delivery, comScore found.

The rest, which in some cases represented up to 80% of a campaign buy, were delivered either to the wrong segments in the US or to consumers outside the US.

There are many reasons for faulty ad operations: One is a basic lack of standards in ad operations. This is a problem that the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As) are trying to fix, by developing a set of standards for use of insertion orders and other business documents.

Human error in insertion order is also common. Vertical ad network firm Adify, for instance, cited a recent insertion order in which an agency provided flawed ad tags for a client campaign — an error noticed almost immediately by Adify's ad operations staff.

But even after being notified, the agency didn't reply or fix the tag for two days. Adify staffers ultimately fixed the code themselves.

Ad networks often sub out a buy to other ad networks, setting the stage for even more miscommunication; a "fix," in this case, may not be passed effectively downstream to networks and publishers.

Many errors also stem from the sheer confusion of site and network management. Agency staff have to be on top of all of their relationships — a daunting task at best.

To resolve rampant campaign discrepancies that arise from a flawed system, the 4As and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) may have to step in. They are currently pushing an identification system for creative assets called Ad-ID, which may ease the process of ad placement and measurement in all channels. As an added benefit, it may improve online ad coding, said ad op firm Theorem.

Last August, comScore and began tracking ad networks' "potential reach" and "actual reach" for online-ad buyers and sellers, curbing networks' habit of exaggerating the number of publishers and pages they can place the ad.

In reality, major publishers reserve a small percentage of their ad space for networks, and it's usually the least valuable part, Valleywag explained.

Man Vs. Machine: Who Can Deliver On Ad Campaigns?

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0600

MEDIA POST - A debate has been raging recently about whether audiences are most accurately reached with targeting technology, which rely on algorithms and software, or with vertical ad networks, which rely on the editorial judgment by humans. In the media, the debate has been sensationalized by portraying these two choices as an either/or decision.

In reality, the choice of targeting technology and vertical ad networks is not an either/or decision at all. The choice a media buyer must make is not "A vs. B", but rather "A vs. A + B". The true choice is between these two options:

A Targeting Technology

A + B Targeting Technology applied to a vertical ad network

Developing this idea further, it translates into a more specific choice between these two options:

A Targeting Technology applied to an arbitrary collection of software-certified but otherwise unreviewed and undisclosed sites (known as a horizontal ad network)

A + B Targeting Technology applied to a collection of sites, all of which are in a vertical category, each of which is approved and reviewed on an ongoing basis by experts in the category, and all of which are transparently presented to the advertiser

Targeting alone, selection 'A' faces limitations of scale. Technology can identify consumers who are expressing interest in a specific product and target them, but this group of consumers is, by definition, small and also a sub-set of the probable consumers for your product. Too much focus ensures that you are limiting your market opportunity. The combination of targeting known prospects complimented by probable prospects requires "A + B."

The reason "A + B" is possible is because vertical ad networks such as Martha's Circle, Forbes Business Blog Network, and TravelChannel FlightDeck have integrated comprehensive technology targeting. A campaign run on TravelChannel FlightDeck, for example, can be geo-targeted, behaviorally targeted, dayparted, and/or targeted by keyword, browser, operating system, and connection speed.

Technology targeting is a necessary-but-not-sufficient means of reaching your audience. Technology is useful for applying targeting criteria, but it is inferior to the expert human eye when it comes to an important task: judging whether a site is engaging to audiences and safe for your brand. This is the Human Algorithm: the marriage of expert human judgment with technology to ensure optimal targeting.

If you care about increasing audiences' engagement with your brand, you'll accept nothing less than A + B.

The Human Algorithm's ROI

What level of brand performance have vertical ad networks been driving for advertisers? We can look to numerous examples.

Glam Media, a popular vertical ad network that focuses on the women's style & fashion category, has worked with advertisers to craft campaigns resulting in marked increases in brand engagement. In a recent Victoria's Secret campaign to re-launch a bra line, Glam implemented a "Bra Questionnaire," asking women about their bra shopping and wearing preferences.

To drive traffic to the survey, Glam created in-house ads and promoted the survey across the Glam Network of independent sites. Within a three-week period, more than 5,000 respondents completed the survey. The survey data gave rise to actionable findings for Victoria's Secret, who published the survey results in a variety of circulars and industry outlets to align with its bra line launch.

We regularly sell inventory on over one hundred vertical ad networks that run on Adify's software platform and have seen a number of recent brand engagement successes. Testors, a maker of paint for model cars and airplanes, recently ran a campaign in which their users could customize their own model design online. The campaign was targeted toward parents and school-age children, and ran across sites selected by Adify-powered vertical ad networks such as Warner Brothers' MomLogic Network and HotChalk Network. Testors' strategy was to capture users' attention at the moment when they were most engaged with high-quality niche content on the topic of parenting. This strategy paid off with click-through rates (CTR) twice the industry average, as thousands of parents envisioned what kind of Testors model kit they would buy for their children for the Holidays.

Another example is Procter & Gamble's Febreze air freshener brand. The content categories chosen for this marketing campaign included Pets and Green, where the campaign selected Adify-powered vertical networks such as Petside Media Network and Sustain Lane. To ensure both reach and quality, the campaign ran on over 1,500 mid-tail and long-tail sites, each handpicked by content experts such as NBC Universal, SustainLane and Warner Brothers. To maximize user engagement, the campaign's expandable banners were complemented by Rovion units featuring a lifelike barking dog. These units delivered an unprecedented CTR for Proctor & Gamble, prompting them to book multiple repeat campaigns across similar arrays of vertical ad networks.

This is the Human Algorithm at work. It is present when advertisers stand firm and say no to blind buys that could harm their brand. It is present when agencies help their clients identify the best verticals to reach, then further refine their strategy by targeting with technology. The Human Algorithm means "no compromises, no tradeoffs," when it comes to reach, quality, precision and campaign ROI.

A+B = Performance.

Ad Operation Failures Dog Agencies, Crippling Client Campaigns

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0600

ClickZ - Ad operations is among the most dreary topics in digital marketing. That is, until you start hearing tales of campaigns gone awry. Then it quickly becomes the most horrifying. Consider the following examples of waste and lost opportunity caused by ad ops errors.

Joe Apprendi, CEO of Collective Media, tells the story of a large advertiser who worked with comScore to determine what percentage of its ad buy was reaching its target audience: U.S. women, aged 18 to 49. The answer, according to Apprendi, was 10 percent, with much of the waste caused by impressions outside the U.S. making their way into the ad buy, he said.

Joelle Gropper Kaufman, VP, marketing and media operations at vertical ad network firm Adify, describes a recent insertion order in which an agency provided flawed ad tags for a client campaign. She said Adify's ad operations staff quickly notified the agency that the ad hadn't generated any impressions, but the firm did not reply to the information or fix the tag that day or the next. On the third day, Adify's ad ops staffers went ahead and fixed the code themselves.

In another incident, Gropper Kaufman said an East Coast advertiser, a firm with a highly regional focus and a product (mattresses) too large to be shipped, placed a large ad buy but accidentally neglected to add geographic targeting to the insertion order, generating potentially massive amounts of waste as ads were delivered to non-prospects elsewhere in the U.S. and beyond.

Research from ComScore indicates only a minority -- often a small minority -- of campaign impressions reach their intended audience with the desired frequency. Of eight U.S. brand campaigns with budgets between $400,000 and $2 million, ComScore said none reached more than 20 percent of their target with a frequency of four impressions or less. Even if you include impressions where frequency exceeded four, none of the campaigns cracked 40 percent for on-target delivery. The remainder of impressions, in some cases upward of 80 percent of a campaign's buy, were delivered either to the wrong segments in the U.S., or to consumers outside the U.S.

"Rather than screaming about clicks and conversions, brand advertisers should be screaming about waste," said Gropper Kaufman. "Mistakes happen. It's the job of ad ops to just think."

Unfortunately, that job requirement is beyond some people on the buy side, as is evidenced by these and other anecdotes.

A number of factors are to blame, including a lack of standards in ad operations and confused agency staff who must manage long lists of site and network relationships. Additionally, even when agency buyers correct ad coding and other mistakes, errors in insertion orders are exacerbated when ad networks sub out those buys to other ad networks, a common practice. In such cases, even when a problem is fixed, the fix is not passed along to downstream networks and publishers.

"The agencies are all in fire-drill mode," said Rob Beeler, VP of content for AdMonsters, an association of ad operations professionals. "It's hard to get them to stop, sit down, and figure out the issues."

Publishers and marketers have begun taking baby steps to improve efficiency and quality control in ad ops. The Interactive Advertising Bureau and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As) have begun working together to develop standards for the use of insertion orders and other business documents, as well as to resolve rampant campaign discrepancies. Additionally, the 4As and the Association of National Advertisers are pushing an identification system for creative assets, called Ad-ID, that's intended to ease the process of ad placement and measurement in all channels. Online ad operations firm Theorem is backing the Ad-ID system "to raise awareness of the need to improve online advertising coding."

Ed Montes, regional manager for Havas Digital in North America, says the problem would be greatly helped by the creation of such standards.

"I see ad ops and the issues with ad ops as friction in the marketplace," he said. "Before you start trafficking into the ad servers, the fact that there's very little standardizatoin across the board, that is where agencies [face problems]."

Chemistry.com Sponsors Lesbian Ad Network

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600

MEDIAPOST - Mark Elderkin found of Lesibian Ad Network Industry veteran Mark Elderkin, the founder/CEO of Gay Ad Network, today is launching Lesbian Ad Network. Chemistry.com and Switzerland Tourism are on board as the vertical online ad network's inaugural partners.

Lesbian Ad Network comprises the world's leading lesbian brands and offers a unique platform for reaching the lesbian market across branded content sites and blogs, with custom editorial sponsorships, viral widget syndication and video advertising, Elderkin said. It is composed of some sites that were originally part of Gay Ad Network--which Elderkin founded in 2007--as well as some new lesbian sites, he said.

Best-selling lesbian magazine Curve, Wolfe Video and lesbian-travel oriented company Olivia have joined TheLWordOnline, GaydarGirls, TheDinah, and more than two dozen other online publishers to create the first major advertising network targeting the lesbian market, Elderkin said.

Elderkin, who will also serve as CEO of Lesbian Ad Network, is a 15-year industry veteran and pioneer in developing gay online advertising and subscription-based businesses. As president of PlanetOut, Inc. he was responsible for global advertising sales, online editorial and business partnerships. Prior to his role with PlanetOut, he was CEO and founder of Gay.com, which he built into the largest gay online community.

If Gay Ad Network's track record is any indication, Elderkin knows what he is doing in launching a new entity in the currently peevish market. Gay Ad Network set new traffic records in December, according to comScore Media Metrix, which reports that its U.S. reach surpassed 1.18 million unique users--greater than the unduplicated reach of PlanetOut, Gay.com, Logo Online and Regent Media sites combined.

Moreover, Quantcast tracked 4.2 million unique monthly users worldwide on Gay Ad Network sites during this period.

Traffic trend analysis shows that the gay and lesbian online audience is shifting away from gay portals to niche LGBT sites and mainstream social networking services.

The lesbian market is attracting increased attention from advertisers as more market research and qualified media reach has become available, Elderkin said. Consumer Marketing Inc.'s Lesbian Consumer Index reports that lesbians have a median annual household income of $80,000, with 80% of those households being childless. Lesbians' higher disposable income relative to the general population is especially relevant in the current economic climate.

"We are replicating our successful gay online advertising model and expanding it to the lesbian market," added Scott Mazer, Gay Ad Network's sales VP. "We intend to leverage behavioral targeting, geo-targeting, content targeting and campaign optimization from our technology partner, Adify, to drive successful brand metrics and performance-based results within this vertical niche."

Combined, Gay Ad Network and Lesbian Ad Network reach over 4 million unique users per month. Both are divisions of Family Powered Networks LLC, a privately held company that provides advertising and marketing services to publishers and companies targeting the LGBT market.

Vertical Ad Networks Clash With Custom Targeting

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600

ClickZ - Vertical ad networks had a big year in 2008, as dozens of publishers began selling ads on behalf of partner sites. They were aided in many cases by Silicon Valley-based Adify, which provides infrastructure and sales support for vertical networks and now powers at least 140 such networks. Seevast and DoubleClick have similar platforms, and many more vertical networks have been built independently by the likes of NetShelter and Travel Ad Network.

Yet the future growth of vertical ad networks would appear at odds with another big trend of the past year. The very largest media sellers -- Google, Platform-A, Yahoo, and Microsoft -- have steadily built up targeting options they say can deliver any audience segment, including interest- and industry-based ones typically aggregated by vertical networks.
Is there room in the media marketplace for both approaches?

It depends who you ask. Sarah Zielie, senior interactive media specialist at Minneapolis-based Periscope, happily works with vertical networks. She estimates 25 percent of her agency's overall ad network spend now goes to niche networks.

"Our spend has been shifting in the favor of vertical ad networks, reducing the budgets of both content placements and general ad network placements," she said.

Razorfish is also experimenting with vertical audience aggregators. Chief Strategy Officer Jeff Lanctot said the Microsoft-owned agency has increased its investment in niche aggregators, though he added some of the uptick is routine testing.

"The vertical ad network model provides more of a brand filter for Martha Stewart or MTV to say, we've looked across thousands of sites in our category and we've deemed these 20 or 30 to be the highest authority. I think that is a compelling story," Lanctot said.

He added, "In my view it's not better or worse than the traditional ad network model, but it's been a better filter for us."

But some believe that advantage will disappear.

Amy Auerbach, SVP Interactive at IPG-owned Initiative, used the word "flat" to describe her spending on vertical ad networks.

"We want to move toward models that have to do with custom targeting, and leveraging new targeting technologies," she said. "We don't necessarily need to go to a vertical content network to reach our customers. We can do that modeling on our own.

"This whole concept of data and targeting optimization is really what's going to start driving the business," she continued.

Stacey Shudak, interactive media director at Ocean Media, says her firm has bought from vertical networks but is more interested in working with larger ad sellers to develop powerful segmentation.

"We have done some vertical stuff, not to a huge amount of success," Shudak said. "More important...is technology that offers more targeting capabilities within the ad network."

Despite those attitudes, many vertical networks report rapid growth. Tech-focused ad network NetShelter launched in May 2006 with 12 sites and 1.2 million U.S. unique visitors. In less than three years it has grown to an estimated 17.7 million spanning 150 sites, according to ComScore. That audience figure puts it ahead of previous tech category leader CNET.

NetShelter's growing reach has been matched by a rise in the size of media buys and the number of advertisers on the network.

"We were getting RFPs [requests for proposals] in the tens of thousands of dollars," in 2006, said CEO Peyman Nilforoush. "Budgets now are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Adify now supports 152 networks, and approximately 100 of those are delivering sales, according to Joelle Gropper Kaufman, the company's SVP of marketing and corporate partnerships.

Kaufman rejects the idea that vertical networks are in conflict with large networks and portals.

"Every agency and media buyer is trying to add value," she said. "Buying directly on portals is part of a media plan, buying on vertical ad networks is part of a media plan, and buying remnant is part of a media plan."

She argues that any advertiser embracing custom targeting on large ad networks at the expense of vertical networks is essentially choosing remnant over premium.

"Adify and other networks not supported by Adify for the most part don't sell remnant," she said. "If they're making that choice [against vertical networks] they're compromising transparency and context in exchange for black box targeting."