Alloy, Zwinky Launch Teen.com Ad Network

Alloy Media + Marketing is joining forces with Zwinky, the virtual world and avatar emporium targeting young teens, for the official launch of Alloy's Teen.com online ad network.

The Zwinky deal is one of a series of planned partnerships that will extend its new Teen.com network to sites with heavy teen traffic, including social network and entertainment zones. At launch, the network's other partners include Habbo, Meez, and RockYou, as well as a number of proprietary Alloy sites.

Alloy, a marketing firm that targets youth, owns or has partnerships with TV, out-of-home, print, cinema and online properties targeting teens and college students. The Zwinky alliance furthers its strategic mission.

The Teen.com network allows advertisers to place display ads across a network that reaches about 17 million teens, according to data provided by comScore. At launch, Teen.com advertisers include Procter & Gamble, Verizon, the CW Network, New Line Cinema, Sony Pictures and Nintendo.

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By partnering with Zwinky--which already has advertising in the form of an Ask.com search function, and plans to introduce other marketing tools soon--Alloy steers clear of the controversy sparked by other social-network sites that introduced advertising in recent months.

The introduction of advertising on Webkinz.com, a virtual world targeting pre-teens, has sparked a parental backlash against the site, according to The New York Times. Parents and groups that advocate limiting advertising to kids argue that buying a Webkinz doll with a Web access code in a toy store means they have effectively paid a fee to use the service, which should therefore be ad-free.

Similarly, Facebook ran afoul of users concerned about privacy when it introduced a new ad service, Beacon--which aggregates data from dozens of popular sites visited by users that allows advertisers to target them more precisely.

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