• by Amy Corr , Staff Writer @MediaPostOTL, June 13, 2002

Real Media (www.realmedia.com) was founded in 1995 by Dave Morgan and Gil Beyda. An offspring of the PubliGroupe Company, one of the oldest media service organizations in the world, Real Media is one of the largest online ad networks in the industry.

Real Media is composed of two distinct networks, The Real Media Portfolio and the iCover Network. The Real Media Portfolio contains popular branded websites such as conducent.com, investors.com and eudora.com, while the iCover Network consists of smaller websites and their remnant inventory. If you’re looking to target a specific audience, the Real Media Portfolio is your choice. If you’re unsure about who your target audience is, then iCover is the better bet. Prices in the Real Media Portfolio are naturally higher than iCover, with branded sites averaging $25 CPM, and category buys in the iCover network averaging $12 CPM.

The objective of Real Media, according to Mark Naples, Vice President of Marketing, is “To become the global leader in digital marketing solutions by positioning ourselves as the industry leader in brand protection for advertisers and publishers.”

In 1996, Real Media launched Open AdStream, a service touted as the only ad management software that gives complete control of campaign information and user data to the publishers. What does that mean? Protection of audience information. Installed on a company’s server, this software allows publishers to serve, track, and manage their ad campaigns and target demographically, geographically, and anonymously. Over 1,400 companies currently use Open AdStream. This past March, Open AdStream served 1 billion ad impressions in five days to Weather.com, during a week when a massive snowstorm was expected. Last month, Real Media debuted Open AdStreamCENTRAL, a centrally hosted version of Open AdStream.

With the expected passage of opt-out language in the upcoming Congressional Privacy Bill, Naples is confident of Real Media’s position in the online world. “We believe that the profiling of users across sites has largely diminished the promise of the Internet for marketers. Such profiling with a common cookie has helped commoditized the medium itself, making the great segmentation of the web by interest category already obsolete. In effect, profiling across sites is killing the goose with the golden egg. Since that’s not how Real Media does business, we expect any statutory change that enhances user privacy to actually benefit our business.”