• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 15, 2010

The ad industry continues to automate systems to squeeze every dollar from campaigns to improve return on investments. Ad network Adify will announce this week that it has licensed NetSeer's Contextual Services and concept-based analysis technology to better predict sites where ads will attract consumers to produce best.

Knowing how to sort through the millions of Web sites to discard those with dribble and keep the ones with great content has become an art. NetSeer aims to help Adify find those sites to help clients gain the best ROI. John Mracek, chief executive officer at NetSeer, says contextual signals, when done correctly, can play an important role in increasing performance and understanding consumer intent.

NetSeer will help create the "short list" that Adify will use to trim down and present to clients. It will give Adify a sense of the sites that fit specific criteria through NetSeer's categorization abilities and KnowledgeBank, a concept graph supported by spiders crawling the Web to determine what's important. It opens up advertising for companies that some refer to as "mid-tail" -- companies that fall well below those on the comScore 500 list.

Joelle Gropper Kaufman, senior vice president of marketing at Adify, says finding those 5,000 well-written and visited Web sites on the topic of sports cards, for example, out of millions on the Web can save time and money.

NetSeer's ability to identify the first cut of sites will support Adify's technology to wade through the second pass, Kaufman says. "This is about buying an audience across sites that they are most passionate about," she says. "Audience buying is code for find-your-person-on-anything, but numerous studies also point to site content, design and other factors as being extremely important."

Branded content on Web sites outperform ad networks or Web portals across key ad metrics, according to research released in April from the Online Publishers Association. The research shows that advertising effectiveness scores high on quality, original content sites, awareness, message association, brand favorability and driving purchase intent.

"There's a lot of dreck, a lot of places where you don't want to place ads," Kaufman says. "We give brands an opportunity to advertise on these sites without having to incur tremendous costs."

Kaufman says because they are smaller sites, advertisers have to run campaigns on a few hundred of them. Many just don't have the bandwidth or support to look at 1,000 sites to pick the 200 to run ads on.