Contextual Brand Advertising
According to the MediaPost article by Tobi Elkin, Jefferies: Online Ad Spending Could Exceed $60B By 2010, investment bank Jefferies & Co. “raised its estimates for the worldwide online advertising industry to more than $60 billion by 2010–up from the $54 billion it projected in 2006” at it’s 3rd Annual Internet Conference.
Though phenomenal growth in search advertising fuels these revised forecasts, growth in brand or display advertising is another significant contributor. “Brand or display advertising represented $16 billion in revenues and accounted for 54% of all online ad dollars in 2006; Jefferies projects it will grow at a 20% clip through 2010.”
So what are the options available to marketers to spend this increase in available brand or display advertising dollars?
To date, a large portion of brand dollars have been spent on site specific buys on large sites and portals. Some of the primary reasons for this are:
- Site specific buys allow the marketer to know the audience through the content they read. As an example, in the article, Contextual Advertising with Style, Samir Arora, founder and chairman of Glam.com, talks about his “vision is to develop a targeted audience and content that provides context and relevance for both advertisers and readers”. Arora says he is trying to achieve his company’s goal of “bringing together content and brand advertising contextually for women online”.
- Site specific buys have also allowed marketers to utilize rich media creatives that have proven to be far more effective for brand advertising. According to this study conducted by Dynamic Logic, one of the leading providers of marketing effectiveness research, rich media campaigns are “generally twice as effective as traditional GIF/JPG campaigns [standard graphical advvertising banners] in their ability to lift a key branding metric: Message Association.”
- In addition, site specific buys allow marketers to utilize third party ad serving which is required for serving certain rich media creatives such as PointRoll creatives as well as for providing a holistic view of the marketer’s campaign. Read more about the benefits of third party adserving in Jay Sears blog post.
For all these reasons, doing site specific media buys has been an effective way for marketers to spend their brand advertising dollars. However, based on the predictions for growth of this spending, marketers will need new avenues of reaching their audience that will give them all the control that they have had with a site specific buy.
At ContextWeb, we are focused in providing a product that meets the above critical needs of brand marketers.
Our product focuses on delivering to marketers the brand control of a site specific buy with the reach and efficiency of a network while allowing the marketer to utilize third party adserving and run rich media creatives from providers such as PointRoll, Eyewonder, Eyeblaster and others.
As an example, a marketer who is running a brand campaign on Glam.com can supplement their brand campaign by running their Rich Media creatives on ContextWeb in the “Style & Fashion” content category. ContextWeb will serve the marketer’s brand message on areas such as the “Style & Fashion” pages of newspaper sites and other non endemic sites and therefore enable the marketer’s brand message to reach a much larger audience who are interested in the same kind of content as the audience at Glam.com.
-- Shanthi Sarkar
Sphere It