• by Larry Dobrow , January 6, 2004

Kanoodle.com has snared one of the Web's big fish, entering into an agreement to provide content-targeted sponsored links for MarketWatch.com. MarketWatch, operator of the CBS MarketWatch and BigCharts web sites, instantly becomes the flagship user of Kanoodle's new ContextTarget product.

Kanoodle's competitors downplay the impact and innovation of the company's sponsored links programs - an IndustryBrains rep recently responded to a recent MediaPost story with a missive arguing that "Kanoodle is a pale and wanting version of IndustryBrains," which boasts "a better list of advertisers and. [a] far greater site distribution." Nonetheless, the relationship with MarketWatch can't be seen as anything other than a substantial step in the right direction for a company referred to by even its founder/chief executive officer as "kind of the biggest search engine you've never heard of."

Lance Podell, the newly appointed president of Kanoodle's Content Division, describes MarketWatch as a "must-buy" for financial services advertisers, and expresses hope that the relationship will lead to others within the competitive online finance space. "I don't know how much better you can do with your first client in a given industry," he enthuses. "When you work with a leader in an industry, the rest of the industry follows."

As for ContextTarget, Kanoodle bills the new product as the only content-targeted sponsored links product that is independent from keyword search advertising. While Podell is eager to tout this separation, perhaps its most promising feature is ad blocking. "Let's say that tomorrow's MarketWatch cover story is about the indictment of an online trading company. Other companies who offer that might say 'I don't want my ad next to that story,'" he explains. "But maybe they also sell mutual funds, so with ContextTarget you can keep those ads live but pull the ones that would look bad next to the news."

Podell claims that Kanoodle is the first to offer such a capability. "In print, you have a standing relationship where if there's an airline crash, all airline ads are pulled," he says. "Online, the best I've seen anybody else do is offer to turn off the account completely. It's a forest-for-the-trees problem - the bigger players in the space are focused on the big picture."