Commentary

Guides Do the Steering

Search is the most widely used online consumer interaction tool today. Yet it’s still common to get Apple the company and apple the edible fruit in the same request. ChaCha wants to eliminate that problem once and for all by marrying automated technology with a human touch.

ChaCha uses 15,000 “guides” — real people based all over the U.S. who are experts in specific areas — to help people find the information they really need. While people are waiting for the guides to turn up the most appropriate content, they see a contextually relevant video ad in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. More than 2 million visitors have conducted more than 10 million page views since the site’s launch in November.

“We see a real fit for some local automotive clients,” explains Sean Black, president of ad agency JL360. Keywords such as Mercedes-Benz might be the same as those in a national search, he says, but with geotargeting and the ability to contextually place video ads, Black says viewers get messages that are more relevant to them. The ad model is a combination of CPC and CPM.

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