• by Masha Geller , April 9, 2003

BURST! Media is on a paid search roll. Within a week of signing a deal with Google, the ad network inked an agreement with Sprinks - one of the top ranked, but somewhat lesser known paid search providers - for target sponsored links to run across a broad swath of the Burst ad network. The deal goes into effect today.

"Burst clearly has one of the best networks of targeted sites. For us it's a natural fit," says Lance Podell, General Manager of Sprinks.

Sprinks has been in the sponsored search business for about two years, originally conceived as Primedia-owned About.com's in-house search provider and expanded to compete with the likes of industry leaders Google and Overture. Sprinks' approach, however, is somewhat different. Whereas Google and Overture rely on algorithms to match ads to content, Sprinks (much like its parent About.com) uses human editors to target by topic, not keywords. The company has built a sophisticated system that allows advertisers to choose the exact content topics (hundreds of them) their ads will appear alongside and then bid for top placement.

In the case of Sprinks' agreement with Burst, "We buy specific topics that our advertisers have selected to buy," Podell says. "We picked some channel level topics, from as broad as health and parenting, to as narrow as career services and web development."

"It's not rocket science that we're going out and buying space on ad networks," says Mark Josephson, EVP of Marketing & Business Development at About, Inc. "We're looking for real reach for our advertisers and Burst does that."

Jarvis Coffin, President and CEO of Burst, says the non-exclusive deal fits perfectly under the familiar heading of targeted paid search. The program will take advantage of BURST's targeted categories to give Sprinks the opportunity to "extend the value of what they offer to their clients. "[The agreement} is not unlike what Google is doing, but different."

And as for the human touch? Bodell, the General Manager of Spinks and Burst have a long history, which, as Coffin puts it, is "the fun part of it for us." Bodell first hired BURST in 1996, "when we were just a few guys in suits in the lobby," as Coffin remembers, and it is largely due to the success of that previous partnership that the current deal was born. "He knows what we can do," Coffin says, "so we're looking at this as the start of another great relationship."