• by Tanya Gazdik , April 29, 2008

It has long been a dirty little secret in the industry that when a media buyer bought 1 million impressions on behalf of a client and the publisher couldn't serve them (without showing the same person the same ad 10 times) the solution was for the publisher to buy more inventory from outside ad networks.

Now, ContextWeb, a contextual advertising company and operator of the ADSDAQ Exchange, has an above-board solution with the launch today of the Reach Extension Program for Web publishers that will enable them to get additional, targeted reach for specific campaigns at no acquisition cost.

This makes the process easier and safer, since ADSDAQ can assure page-specific targeting and better positioning on more appropriate sites. So a small publisher that wants to pitch a huge account could use the system to offer enough inventory to impress the potential client, said Shanthi Sarkar, senior vice president of Product Development and Operations at ContextWeb, Inc.

The program eliminates inventory holding cost for publishers and is essentially risk-free, since publishers buy on the exchange only when they have a specific need for additional audience and content, Sarkar said. Publishers submit a bid for specific inventory on the ADSDAQ exchange, and if there is inventory available for that price, they purchase and package it with their existing inventory for any given ad campaign, she said.

"The unique differentiator in our program is the fact that we do a real-time scan of the page to check for content affinity," Sarkar tells Online Media Daily. "This allows publishers to extend their reach in a brand-safe manner. For example, if Sports Illustrated is selling a golf sponsorship package on their site, they could package additional reach on golf related pages from the ADSDAQ exchange along with golf inventory on Sports Illustrated to bring a larger, targeted reach to the advertiser."

Market trends predict display advertising spending to grow at a faster clip as more brand advertisers see the value of advertising online, she said. "However, the online user base is getting highly fragmented as users spend more and more time on the long-tail sites," Sarkar said. "Publishers such as Forbes and Martha Stewart are combating this user fragmentation by creating their own networks of long-tail sites."

The program has been offered for a short time in beta with good success. Paul DeBraccio, CEO of Interevco, a rep firm for health and healthy living Web sites, said his company finds the program adds value for both publishers and advertisers. " We are able to fulfill additional advertiser demand by accessing brand-safe inventory on short notice through the Reach Extension Program," he said. "This is especially helpful when our normal inventory is sold out, or when advertisers are looking for more reach within specific, targeted categories."