Buyers Can Assess Contextual Performance And Take Action Via ADSDAQ Tool

by Tanya Irwin, Mar 21, 2008, 7:00 AM

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ContextWeb, Inc., a contextual advertising company and operator of the ADSDAQ Exchange, has launched the ADSDAQ Exchange Agency Trading Desk: a technology platform that will enable media buyers to see how their online ad campaigns are performing and--more importantly--offer a way to instantly adjust buys accordingly.

"One of the things we've leveraged for advertisers inside the ad exchange for (three and a half years) is associating performance with context and making that actionable inside the ad exchange," said Jay Sears, ContextWeb's SVP, Strategic Products. "What the ADSDAQ Exchange Agency Trading Desk is about is providing insights across an agency's entire media spend, and making those insights both actionable and scalable. Both inside a placement and also across a campaign, an agency can now see and associate performance to context."

With the push of a dashboard button, buyers can purchase more inventories in the better-performing contextual areas and offer to sell inventory that is underperforming. The trading desk can track campaigns running outside of the ADSDAQ Exchange system, giving media agencies an efficient and effective way to track campaign performance against more than 386 contextual categories of inventory.

Nothing like the ADSDAQ Exchange Agency Trading Desk is offered by any other company in the online advertising space, Sears said.

Six agencies--including Omnicom's OMD and WPP's GroupM--are participating in the invitation-only beta program, which started at the beginning of the year, Sears said. Collectively, the beta agencies represent billions of dollars in annual online display ad spending. The program will be opened up to additional agencies in the summer, he said.

Agencies currently in the beta program said the insights gathered via the trading desk have been helpful.

"What this does is it makes us a little more granular," said Steve Katelman, Director, Global Strategic Partnerships, Digital at OmnicomMediaGroup. "Within a travel page, we can say (for example) context that has camping is outperforming context that has hotels. If we put that filter on top of our buys, it's just giving us one more data point for us to precisely target our audience and deliver a customized message. To me, that's beautiful."

"In the past, if we had an advertiser that wanted to spend X amount of dollars on a site, our options were let it run to its completion, or if we realized it wasn't running perfectly, cancel it all," he said. "This will give some exposure to find out if part of it is working, ultimately for us to be able to cherry-pick that inventory."

The trading desk will be provided at no cost to agencies participating in the ADSDAQ Exchange, and provide actionable analysis of how their campaigns are performing online. As particular contextual categories (such as luxury autos, home repair, adventure travel or mutual funds) provide superior performance for any given campaign, media buyers can immediately acquire additional inventory and offer the remaining inventory for sale on the ADSDAQ Exchange at a price they control, Sears said.

The trading desk utilizes a real-time, page-level contextual engine that is patent-pending and has been in commercial production since 2000. By determining the context of every ad impression inside a campaign placement and across an entire digital ad campaign, an agency can tie performance measures to one of 386 categories present in ContextWeb's contextual taxonomy.

In other news at ContextWeb, the company announced Thursday that it has expanded operations to the UK and has hired Ross Caveille to be the ADSDAQ exchange's Country Manager, a newly created position. Caveille's mission will be to sell UK inventory that is available from sites on the ADSDAQ exchange, and help advertisers reach the exchange's audiences of UK visitors.

For the past year, Caveille has been group account director at DRIVEpm, Microsoft (London), working with key British agencies. Previously he was an account director for Mediabrokers Ltd, aQuantive Inc., and before that, senior integration account manager with AdLINK Internet Media Ltd.

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