• by Tameka Kee , July 22, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO -- AdBrite now offers behavioral targeting across the more than 70,000 sites within its network. The San Francisco-based company announced the news at OMMA Behavioral on Monday, along with the claim that it has become the largest ad network (in terms of sites available), to offer behavioral targeting. 

"This is really just applying a new form of targeting to our existing network," said Paul Levine, AdBrite's vice president of marketing. "So as soon as we switched it on, we became the largest behavioral targeting network in terms of number of sites. Our best guess was that ValueClick had the largest number of behaviorally targeted sites available. Our site count is five times theirs."

Advertisers can choose to target consumers across 14 categories like Automotive, Dating & Singles, and Health, as well as over 3,000 sub-categories, and AdBrite's Open Targeting Exchange (OTEx) serves ads based on interest, purchase intent, or a combination of the two. Applicable ad units include standard IAB display buys (what AdBrite dubs "graphical ads"), as well as the company's Full Page ad. The behaviorally targeted ads are bought via auction, with performance reports and campaign optimization tools available.

According to Ignacio Fanlo, AdBrite's CEO, both publishers and advertisers benefit from tapping the company's new behavioral targeting offering. "Advertisers are now able to target consumers on sites that they can't reach elsewhere, and tens of thousands of site owners have been introduced to behavioral targeting for the first time," Fanlo said.

Levine added that the self-serve nature of AdBrite's targeting technology would continue to make it the network of choice for both large and small publishers. "We have an easy network for publishers to get started in," Levine said. "It takes just a snippet of code to power our products."

The behavioral targeting units are currently available to a select group of advertisers by invitation.