• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 16, 2009

Lotame will announce a partnership Thursday with Dimestore Media that allows it to conduct multiple-question surveys directly from ads. Before serving up the ad, metrics from questions calculated on the fly determine the person's intent to buy, brand awareness, primary message retention and attitude of the brand.

The agreement gives Lotame unlimited access to Dimestore's non-identifiable consumer data, incorporating it into its own reporting platform throughout the campaigns.

"It's the first time we've been able to take survey data and incorporate it into optimization," says Andy Monfried, CEO of Lotame. "Publishers can serve a creative for a brand and rotate it into a survey. That's powerful. The response rates are between 10 and 100 times higher, compared with other major survey companies."

That's an important advancement for the online ad industry, Monfried says. Five data points from surveys -- intent, favorability, preference, awareness and ad recall -- will combine with existing data points -- demographics, response rates, time spent, frequency, clicks, and other metrics -- before serving up ads.

Dimestore will give Lotame the ability to serve up a display ad before and after showing the survey. The ads set to appear in time increments morph into the four- or five-question survey after 10 to 15 seconds, for example. Brands can present multiple questions in the same banner ad, and they are customizable.

Marissa Gluck, managing partner at Los Angeles-based Radar Research, sees one problem with this scenario. "Consumers have trained themselves to avoid advertising," she says. "They have developed blind spots, and publishers will need to overcome the blindness first. At least with pop-up surveys, the ads are intrusive."

Pop-ups are exactly the kind of intrusive behavior that Monfried would like to avoid. Most of the ads will serve up in social networks, such as Bebo and Flixster. The survey data is collected and processed in real-time before serving up the ad. People viewing the ads never have to leave the Web page to take the survey. The survey serves up in the ad. It's not just measuring at a click, Monfried says -- it's determining consumer intent at the time they see the brand's ad.

"Publishers waste millions of impressions to get surveys completed for brands," Monfried says. "It's a colossal waste of time and effort."

Dimestore began providing the service earlier this year. The biggest challenge has been integration, but Scott Cohen, CEO of Dimestore, says the platform is "agnostic" to integrate with a variety of technologies.

Dimestore's data-collection tool generates a tag that can be served through DART, Atlas or any ad-serving platform. Rather than wait six weeks to compile the data from surveys, the platform provides it as the person taking the survey clicks on the answers.