The new ActiveAds promise to deliver tailored messages without requiring marketers to manage multiple creative units. Banner ad creative is adjusted automatically to display the most relevant text and images based on anonymous information provided by a client or ValueClick Media, the company's performance ad unit.

In addition to using retargeting data--information about sites users visited after leaving e-commerce sites--to customize messages, ActiveAds can be geo-targeted and targeted contextually based on the type of site someone is on. ValueClick boasts that ActiveAds can also be finely tuned according to an infinite number of attributes that an advertiser supplies to the company via XML.

"ActiveAds is extremely well-suited for our clients who believe one ad does not fit all," said Bill Todd, general manager of ValueClick Media, in a statement. "Too long have clients with a wide variety of products been forced to show the same content to all prospects, despite the wealth of data which can be used to improve performance by tailoring ad creative to each individual consumer."

Tax preparation service TaxBrain is among the initial advertisers using ActiveAds.

Banner ads have become the whipping boy of online advertising, generating an average click-through rate of less than 1% and steeply falling rates across ad networks. ValueClick therefore stands to benefit from any improvements in performance it can deliver through ActiveAds.

While feeling the pain of the ad pullback, ValueClick beat analysts' reduced fourth-quarter estimates, posting a profit of 16 cents per share on revenue of $150.1 million. The company's media business was down 19% to $74 million compared to the year-earlier period. ValueClick's guidance for the first quarter of 2009 calls for revenue growth to slow by 25% from a year ago to $126 million from $132 million.

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