• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 6, 2012

BlurbIQ believes it answered the call of the Interactive Advertising Bureau to build a drag-and-drop advertising unit that lets brands and publishers de-clutter Web pages and improve CPM and click-through rates.

Facebook images and videos used to create everything from banner to pre-roll ads get dragged from a content management system and dropped into the ad unit platform. Marketers can collect and analyze data from each individual piece in the ad unit as Web visitors click and share the pieces of content.

A handful of companies, like Mojiva, Break Media and iVillage have or will begin to use BlurbIQ.  Other companies, like Advanse, Jivox, Adexcel and Flite, have begun to offer this type of service, according to Peter Minnium, head of brand initiative at the IAB.He says Forbes supports this type of "billboard with a near do it yourself product."

The BlurbIQ model lets marketers export an ad from one platform and import it into another, changing the specs for the specific device, such as tablet, smartphones, and desktop. Building an ad unit for L'Oreal, for example, requires marketers to name it, and pull in saved elements from a content library.

"It's so easy a kindergartner can do it," said Scott Reese, BlurbIQ CEO.

The DIY ad unit built in HTML5 receives a unique URL associated with the piece of content. It acts as a Web page, making it searchable in google.com, bing.com, yahoo.com and other search engines.

Optimizing the DIY ad unit means URLs have whatever SEO-focused description the brand wants to use, such as "/carnival_cruises or /seeking_a_friend_for_the_end_of_the_world," Reese said. The person clicking on the search engine results can now gain access to the ad through a link that serves up in search engine results.

The ad uses the same URL to allow Web visitors to share the content across social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. That sharing increases links back to the SEO location and increases the authority and page rank. Reese said the ability for search engine bots to crawl and index the links is built into each campaign.