AdBrite To Add Premium Pricing Option

Online exchange AdBrite plans to launch a new program that would create a hybrid of premium and remnant inventory. The new feature, "Guaranteed Delivery," will allow publishers to reserve a portion of inventory that would typically sell at remnant prices for advance media buys at a premium price.

AdBrite CEO Iggy Fanlo disclosed the new program Tuesday at a panel on auction-based media buying at the Ad:Tech conference in New York. AdBrite was one of several emerging online ad and content exchanges represented on the panel including AdECN, eBay, and Mochila.

AdBrite, which itself this week announced its switch to an auction model after starting in 2004 as a more conventional ad network, is adding the reserve inventory feature in the next month in response to agencies' demands for a way to make guaranteed media buys through AdBrite.

For advertisers, Fanlo liked the new option of being able to reserve a plane seat ahead of time rather than waiting on stand-by. It's also similar to eBay's Buy It Now feature, which allows a buyer to purchase an item before auction at a set price.

Fanlo noted that brand advertisers especially want to lock in inventory in advance for a promotion or campaign timed to a specific event--such as a movie opening or product launch. Through AdBrite's Guaranteed Delivery, marketers would be able to reserve inventory up to a year in advance.

In addition to purchasing inventory at a set price for specified inventory, advertisers would be able to cancel ad buys for a full refund at the highest price levels, said Fanlo. He expects pricing for reserve buys to range from 20% to 150% above those they would fetch in the auction process.

Increased revenue from the premium pricing would also be a boon to the many smaller Web publishers AdBrite seeks to reach through its exchange. One of AdBrite's underlying goals is to tap into undervalued inventory in the "long tail" of highly targeted niche sites and blogs.

Through its recent investment in ad exchange Right Media, Yahoo also hopes to mine untapped ad opportunity on social networking sites and blogs, according to panelist Todd Teresi, Yahoo's vice president of global sales operations. The Right Media Exchange allows advertisers to bid on non-premium ad inventory and has attracted more than 11,000 buyers and sellers, including 60 ad networks.

For many social media sites, "demand hasn't reached a point where it knows how to use that inventory effectively," said Teresi. By providing greater transparency and market information, Right Media and other exchanges want to bring increased efficiency to online ad buying. In that vein, the panelists agreed that remnant inventory was simply "mispriced" inventory.

Resistance to the auction model stems mainly from a lack of understanding about how they work, said panelists. William Urschel, founder and CEO of AdECN, an exchange for online display advertising aimed at ad networks, said he often describes the company as "a Nasdaq" for online ads to help explain the business model.

Separately, two new ad networks, from startup Adify and search and advertising services company Marchex, were also announced Tuesday.

Adify's Build Your Own Network platform takes a allows advertisers and publishers to create their own niche ad networks. Adify handles all of the technical functions related to the networks including campaign management, performance tracking and billing.

Among the company's existing clients are Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, which is using the Adify platform to serve ads across its new sponsored blogroll ad network.

Meanwhile, Marchex unveiled a direct navigation network that allows advertisers to bid on a cost-per-click basis for placement on its network of more than 200,000 owned-and-operated Web domains. The network gets traffic when users type a URL or set of keywords directly into their browser or from organic search results.

Advertisers bid on keywords associated with the sites on which they wish the ads to appear. By selecting "diploma" as a keyword, for instance, the ad would appear on sites in the Marchex Network such as ged.com and technicalschools.com. The main selling point of direct navigation traffic is that it typically leads to a higher conversion rate than other sources including search engines.

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