Chitika | Pulse
a weekly data analysis medium for the online marketing industry
Issue XV
Chitika | Pulse Archive
Web 2.0 is all about branding in social media. Recent Prospero Technologies research projects that 88% of marketers who use social media plan to spend more on it this year, and 31% of those said they will spend “significantly more.” Social media has proven to be a particularly effective and powerful environment for brand marketing (i.e.; buzz marketing), and since brand marketing is all about display ads, this means looming competition for traditionally huge, and industry domineering, SEM ad-budgets.
Shira Ovide’s recent Wall Street Journal article, “Do-It-Yourself Display Ads May Reshape Online Marketing,” describes self-service enabling technologies which promise major growth for the display ad market.
Ovide explains that display advertising options had traditionally been “too expensive and too difficult to create for many companies”, and the industry’s current solution? Follow Google, and the advertising model that made her a $185 billion company.
Similar to today’s SEM self-service programs—namely Google’s AdWords—tomorrow’s display advertising opportunities will be available to the general advertising public. New technologies and services are emerging, including self-service ad system AdReady (launched in fall 2007 with Bain Capitial LCC’s Bain Capital Ventures as a backer) that allow advertisers of all sizes and budgets to directly buy (or more accurately rent-out) ad spaces on publisher sites.
Ovide describes that before services like AdReady advertisers found orchestrating a display ad campaign to be a long and daunting process, and the alternative of turning to, “an ad agency to do it might cost tens of thousands of dollars.”
Ovide thoroughly and accurately outlines the positive impact that universal access to self-service display advertising will bring to marketplace and ad industry; widening the pool of advertisers who will collectively bring projected big-time ad spending. This is all great…but what about the publishers?
Since day one Chitika has been committed to satisfying the needs of our publishers first. Therefore, I view this industry shift from a different angle, and must emphasize that self-service display ad technology will also be instrumental for the future content reach and monetization goals of online publishers.
The biggest advantage of this new technology? As AdReady promises; “to ease the headaches and guesswork and to lower the costs associated with buying ads.” Self-service ad display options take all of the back-end work out of running ad campaigns, including; ad serving technology, data reporting and analysis systems, along with handling advertising account transactions. Furthermore, companies that offer self-service ad options to publishers can serve their own network ads in the space if a direct advertisement is not currently running, and the publisher will therefore continuously earn revenue (*when a network ad runs the self-service system company will receive a revenue share).
Opening up the display market to the general advertising public will increase the competition for display space and therefore increase the price for ads, and in this industry, the dollar ultimately ends up with the publisher. Also, in this shift from an industry SEM to display advertising trend, publishers of all sizes and content categories will have the opportunity to continue to position themselves in the ad marketplace and monetize through brand marketing.
About Chitika | Pulse
Chitika | Pulse is a weekly publication that highlights emerging trends in online advertising and merchandising in the blogosphere.
By offering a succinct analysis of online consumer behavior in Chitika’s network, Chitika | Pulse exclusively correlates trends to address a wide range of topics related to online branding, e-commerce, retail in the long tail, and direct merchandising within the blogosphere and social networks.
By Tessa Rudd, Strategic Partnerships Coordinator – Advertising Media Division
