• by Shankar Gupta , September 19, 2005

Search engine marketing firm Reprise Media today is expected to unveil a new product geared mainly toward online newspapers, magazines, and other sites that update frequently with time-sensitive information.

The product, dubbed FeedCast, automatically culls the feeds of publisher sites to construct search ads that promote up-to-the-minute content on major engines like Google and Yahoo!

The process involves mining the RSS feeds of client's sites, extracting relevant keywords and putting them in pre-set ad templates; and then, after an editorial review process, placing the ads on major search engines.

Reprise, which has been beta testing the product with 12 clients for the last few months, recently applied for a patent, said Josh Stylman, the company's managing partner.

Stylman said the tool has streamlined the procedure for creating sponsored search ads for news publications. "Before, it would take several days to get these effective news stories live--it was inherently old news," he said, adding, "What used to take days can now take hours."

He characterized the idea behind FeedCast as similar to that of Google's AdSense, except that rather than matching ads to content, the product is "flipping the script" by automatically generating ads based on articles. "We're doing it for the advertiser to advertise that article," he said.