The online info aggregation site launched the Content Sponsorship ad model about nine months ago, offering marketers non-standard 500 x 140 ad units that they could populate with content like quizzes, blog posts, or images and articles of their choosing.

DoubleClick's DART technology would then serve the ad onto relevant results pages within the Answers.com network--targeted by options like geography, keyword, topic and category.

Media Contacts (an interactive division of Havas Media) chose to test the Content Sponsorship ads with clients in the travel vertical. According to Rob Griffin, senior vice president, U.S. director of search for Media Contacts, two factors made the ad model a soft sell--the fact that Answers.com made them available on a CPM basis, and the way they complemented the clients' overall search strategies.

"There's the battle for visibility on the search engine results page with both natural and sponsored search. If you look at the way the [Answers.com] pages are structured, there's a lot of text-heavy content from encyclopedias, Wikipedia and other local resources that's cross-referenced and hyperlinked--so it's very friendly to search engine spiders," said Griffin.

"Content Sponsorship provides an additional way to put marketer content in front of users that are looking specifically for that info," he said.

"We get a lot of traffic coming from search engines--and in most cases we'll come up as a result on the first page," said Robert Formentin, vice president of sales at Answers.com. Formentin added that the info aggregation site chose to go with CPM as opposed to CPC or auction-based pricing to make it easier for the new creative unit to be accepted. "We're flexible when it comes to pricing models, but we wanted to conform with the rest of advertising that's out there," he said.

According to Griffin, the CPM pricing and impressive return-on-ad-spend for Content Sponsorship ads have ensured that Media Contacts will continue to use the model for current and future clients.

"The click-through rates and engagement metrics were significantly higher than other ad models--but you expect them to be higher because the ad was linked contextually to information users were searching for," said Griffin.

Following such positive agency and marketer feedback, Answers.com is set to expand the Content Sponsorship ads to new verticals--with financial and healthcare information as the next, most-logical categories. "We did it first with the travel vertical and it's done extremely well, so we'll continue to expand in areas that have a lot of content," said Formentin. "Any marketer content that is created for educational purposes about a product, service or category is perfect to match with content like ours."

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