• by July 5, 2000

Adfusion - www.adfusion.com - having just secured $4.5 million in first round funding, today revealed plans for its “industry-changing, business-to-business collaboration hub application,” scheduled to be available for ad agencies nationwide in October of 2000. According to company officials, Adfusion (formerly known to a select few as AdGig.com) is developing a service that provides the offline advertising and media industries with an integrated, business-to-business marketplace for the purchase and sale of traditional media. Although companies such as OneMediaPlace, AdOutlet, MediaMarketMakers and others have been developing models for buying and selling traditional media online in an exchange-like fashion, Adfusion claims their concept is an industry first - the company believes that offline media is still the primary gateway for successful, comprehensive ad campaigns.

"Despite the commotion around the online advertising marketplace, traditional media is still the leading venue for advertisers," said Gary Seehoff, chairman and co-founder of Adfusion. "Although this is not a new marketplace, the current process -- from research to negotiation and analysis to reporting -- is inefficient and costly. The adoption of Adfusion will radically and positively affect the way we do business."

Adfusion says current media-selling websites fail to deliver on the promise of providing a comprehensive and integrated media-buying solutions for media and advertising agency professionals. Adfusion plans to combine research, aggregation, request for avails and private negotiation technology between buyers and sellers into one application that will incorporate a dynamic pricing model to allow media sellers to list avails with pricing parameters that can be changed in real time. Pre- and post-campaign analysis will also be performed applying standard rating metrics to prospective and actual campaigns.

For an advertising agency, the Adfusion application will enhance the research, aggregation, negotiation, execution, reporting and tracking process, company officials say.

Notably, Adfusion's exchange, called a Collaboration Hub, will be enabled through the Candle Integration Network. Current exchanges are hampered by a lack of deeper business collaboration due to the complexity of integration with sellers' and buyers' legacy systems. With Candle’s help, Adfusion plans to integrate with the back-end systems of both media and advertising agency systems, preserving the personalized offer/counter-offer format used by the industry.