• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 14, 2009

Creating display ads could become as easy as paid search. At least that's AdReady's mission. The company will release a suite of services Tuesday, lowering the barriers to creating and running display advertisements across a host of sites.

The new features for the suite of services -- AdReady for Advertisers-Premium, AdReady for Agencies, and AdReady for Publishers -- allow companies to buy and sell online display advertising. The services are designed to drive down marketing costs by making display advertising function more like paid search advertising. This puts the advertiser in control of driving Web site traffic and sales.

Aaron Finn, CEO and president at Seattle-based AdReady, wants to bring the more than one million paid search advertisers into display. "We are trying to bring display to the masses by reducing barriers, entry costs, and minimum budget size," he said.

AdReady for Advertisers-Premium targets medium to large advertisers that spend $5,000 monthly for three or more months. A template-based library allows users to customize a variety of ads with text, logs and photos in minutes. A notation under the ad template gives users insight into the click-through rate for each.

Most of the click-through rates on the automobile dealer ads ranged between .05% and .25%. "Anything over a quarter percent click-through rate is above average," he said.

Creating ads is free. AdReady takes a percent of the ads that run through the publishing network. The service offers geographical targeting by a variety of topics such as ZIP codes. It provides a start and end date and daily budget.

Through APIs, the platform communicates with Google and Yahoo to determine the campaign's bid and keyword recommendations. It helps marketers create the best media plan for the specific budget.

The optimization tools and reports let businesses reduce costs by fine-tuning campaigns in real-time -- a benefit not available through other static ad platforms. Media owners not only drive greater competition for their inventory by offering cost-effective rates, but also improve the relevancy of ads for their audience. AdReady's solutions are proven to save clients hundreds of thousands of dollars, lower the cost of marketing spend and deliver better results.

Before cofounding AdReady in 2006, Finn ran digital marketing at Classmates.com. During the six years that Finn was at the social media company, the company spent about $100 million in digital advertising and about $95 million on display, compared with $5 million on search.