• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, June 12, 2007

Playing up its position as an independent ad serving shop, Eyeblaster on Monday went live with a new suite of campaign management tools.

The new version of Eyeblaster's campaign management suite offers channel integration capabilities, global campaign support, and a proprietary analytics module for measuring and reporting on a campaign.

The initiative comes in the wake of several major industry acquisitions, which has left Eyeblaster as one of the few larger ad campaign managers without ties to a major media company or agency holding company.

(To quickly recap: Google agreed to buy DoubleClick for $3.1 billion; Microsoft agreed to by aQuantive for $6.1 billion; and WPP decided to buy 24/7 Real Media for about $649 million.)

Gal Trifon, Eyeblaster's president and chief executive officer, chose the most diplomatic words when noting Eyeblaster's independence: "The market's desire for a comprehensive, publisher-agnostic solution is met by Eyeblaster Ad Campaign Manager."

Nir Shimoni, Eyeblaster's vice president of product management, was more direct with regard to the company's market position. "With this new release now we're running up against DoubleClick and [aQuantive's ad campaign unit] Atlas," he said. "The fact that we are independent should be very appealing to advertisers."

Meanwhile, a new study from online ad network Collective Media found that some 88% of online advertisers and agencies plan to use online ad networks in 2007, with 66% planning to increase their use of ad networks. The main reason agencies and advertisers limit their use of ad networks is editorial control, cited by 59% of respondents.

Eyeblaster's new ad manager also allows for direct connection to Microsoft Excel for simplified analysis and custom reporting, as well as video ad interactions, detailed viewer metrics and site overlap.

In Collective Media's study, 79% of agency/advertiser respondents considered portals the primary alternatives to ad networks, while 69% cited publishers, and 59% paid search.

Some 40% of respondents, meanwhile reported using ad networks for both branding and direct marketing, while a similar proportion reporting using networks only for direct marketing campaigns.