• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, November 9, 2005

Viacom on Tuesday said it signed a deal with Kanoodle to serve contextually based text ads on CBS television station's group of Web sites.

CBS's TV Media Group, led by Jonathan Leess, has slowly been relaunching each of its 17 local station sites since July with a surface polish, a souped-up video flash player, and a slew of local features. Recently, sites have launched in Green Bay, Sacramento, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore. Kanoodle will now serve site visitors targeted text links based on particular topics that appear on each of these sites. In July, Leess told OnlineMediaDaily he had conducted three soft launches with station Web sites in Salt Lake City www.kutv.com, Minneapolis www.wcco.com, and Denver www.cbs4denver.com.

The focal point of each CBS local site is its video streaming product, which allows for free access to the thousands of hours of each local station's archived video libraries, as well as each day's news features. A local search engine, which incorporates ZIP-code driven results enhanced by retrospective and prospective search products, is also included on each site.

The overall initiative also features desktop, wireless, and mobile distributed components--including news, traffic, weather, and entertainment alerts in voice and text, and eventually, video. Also featured prominently on the new sites are real-time weather maps and forecasting alerts; live traffic cameras, maps, and accident and construction alert systems that support real-time routing directions; local real estate guides, and sports scoreboards and news. There are also localized content sections dedicated to health, lifestyles, food, entertainment, pets, shopping, autos, and careers.

Kanoodle offers advertisers the ability to have their text ads appear on specific pages of sites. There seems to be a demand on the part of advertisers for that sort of control; Google recently announced several updates to its AdSense program, one of which gives advertisers the power to select which sites they want to appear on.

The smaller contextual firms like Kanoodle also have a reputation for changing a premium compared to Google and Yahoo! Kanoodle CEO Lance Podell previously said the reason for the higher fees is that marketers bid more for placement in Kanoodle's network. He has estimated that Kanoodle's average keyword bid is 70 cents, while the average minimum bid is 20 cents.