• by Christopher M. Schroeder , September 27, 2004

Ad serving is in the hands of some impressive, large and well-funded enterprises in DoubleClick, 24/7 Real Media, aQuantive and others. Fundamentally, ad serving has had to be assumed by both publishers and advertisers as a given - ads just need to get up when they're supposed to, no questions asked. For that reliability, we have all been willing to accept some bumpy functionality and not overly sophisticated analytic capabilities.

An upstart thinks we can all do better - and for less. CheckM8, an Israeli company who has had capabilities in rich media ads for some time, is trying to convince publishers it has a better mousetrap. One of its founders Dana Ghavami - an avid technologist and 2003 Laureate of the Computerworld Honors Program -- recently told me why.

Christopher M. Schroeder:The ad servings space is crowded with some well financed players, why do you like it?

Dana Ghavami: I like the market because we (fore)see what it can become with innovative technology. Ad serving to date has been about ad delivery, which is not the biggest challenge anymore. Serving an ad to the page today is a given, but mission-critical features to the bottom line of publishers and agencies are not.

There has been a major lack of innovation from the leaders in the space. Sellers of any product need to know how much inventory they have for sale, and what their revenues are from specific products. Imagine a retailer not knowing what they have in stock or how much they've made on a particular SKU?

CMS:What makes checkm8 different than the competition?

DG: We take a fresh approach to overcoming challenges... Our ad management system was built from the ground up with the input of large online publishers. In contrast, our competitors built their technologies to support their own media businesses, then licensed it as it was to third parties. Those systems weren't designed to understand things like audience measurement, forecasting-based reach and frequency and on multiple targeting criteria.

CheckM8 released its first product for rich media over three years ago with an entirely new concept: a platform to dynamically deliver any ad format to a web page, which was tied down to the traditional boundaries of banners and buttons at that time.

Our latest AdVantage full-scale ad serving offering [offers customer-focused innovation]. There are numerous growing pains which more and more publishers are realizing require treatment by a unified system for major issues such as accurate inventory management and forecasting, integrated rich media, flexible and advanced ad delivery, yield and IO management.

CMS:How's it going so far?

DG: Very well. We've been able to establish a prestigious worldwide base of publishers with our premier Rich Media Manager product, which is now powering popular and custom premium out-of-banner formats on The New York Times, Tribune Interactive, ABC TV, TV Guide, Terra Lycos, MSN international amongst many others.

We're also gaining great traction with publishers with our new AdVantage ad serving system. Over a dozen clients have signed on so far, and we are getting a great response in the market. The one challenge is that folks are so used to all ad servers being the same that that they almost have to go through an awakening to see that there is something better out there that, finally, does what they want an ad server, or rather an ad management system, to do. All ad servers are not created equally!

CMS:What are the most important needs of advertisers and publishers right now?

DG: I think any publisher you ask would tell you inventory management and forecasting, especially now that every impression has great value since the industry is picking up and sites are getting sold out again. There are a lot of fundamental flaws that exist with traditional ad servers that prevent accurate delivery and estimations of inventory due to their architecture. This literally costs publishers big time on a daily basis...

Publishers and advertisers most likely view scaling rich media as another major area needing improvement. Interactivity is the untouchable characteristic of our industry over traditional media and nothing can deliver better than rich media. It provides the highest performance, rates and the means to break from the clutter.

CMS:What do you think is the next best new thing in online advertising? Are you ready for it?

DG: Everyone loves talking about the buzz topics of contextual, behavioral and streaming video advertising. These topics have been heard before and while they are cutting edge, our sense is that they are part of a cyclical heat wave. If you look at the stats when it comes to very narrow targeting, you're talking about a very small percentage of online buys...

But, we feel that the next big thing is maybe not so sexy on the outside however as they say carries its beauty on the inside. We see aspects such as automatically optimizing campaigns to provide maximum yield, making the workflow process simpler, and taking away some of the impediments to more sophisticated campaigns as the next big things -- and we're ready. We believe low cost and easy execution are the keys to success of search advertising and want to do the same for bigger publishers and agencies.

CMS: What keeps you up late at night?

DG: David Letterman. Actually, it's really the sounds of joy we hear when presenting our technology. We strive to make customers thrive.