• by Tameka Kee , June 9, 2008

The latest entrant to the ad network fray isn't built on display and rich media CPMs--it's all about selling pay-per-click (PPC) text ads on a local, national and spot level. It's Adhere, a new offering from Marchex, and it goes head-to-head with Google's AdSense.

Marchex's Adhere is a consolidation of two of the Seattle-based online advertising tech and services company's subsidiaries, IndustryBrains and Enhance Interactive. Industry Brains allowed advertisers to place contextual ads across sites in verticals like home improvement, real estate and business, while Enhance Interactive offered paid search placement through partners like in-text ad provider Snap and AdBrite. Adhere bundles those services with buys on OpenList, Marchex's roster of locally focused Web sites to create a one-stop shop for local and nationally placed paid search and contextual ads.

"We're a big believer in local. The OpenList network alone gets about 30 million unique visitors each month," said Leigh McMillan, vice president of marketing at Marchex. "And we want to make it easier for advertisers to make local buys and get national distribution with premium publishers at the same time. You can buy TV in spot, national and local, so why not text ads?"

While Marchex's Adhere is focused on text units, McMillan said that there would be some display inventory. In the coming months, the company also plans to integrate more of its VoiceStar call-tracking technology into OpenList--which would add pay-per-call inventory to the Adhere mix.

McMillan said that brands like Roto-Rooter and Orkin would likely be the prime targets for Adhere, as they need a blend of national presence and local availability. "When my plumbing is backed up, I need someone local to fix it," McMillan said. "I may know the Roto-Rooter name, but if I search online, I'm trying to find the closest plumber to me." She added that travel-related companies and brands that served different kinds of products geographically were also likely to flock to Adhere.

As a text-based ad network, comparisons to Google AdSense are inevitable. And while McMillan said Marchex had no illusions about the fact that Adhere would be competing with AdSense for ad spend, the company was confident that there is more than enough budget to go around. "The brands we work with are saying we need more quality traffic at volume," McMillan said. "We've maxed out Google and we need additional ad channels."

McMillan said that it was a combination of those client requests and shifts in the overall marketplace that fueled the development of Adhere. "Marchex is a company that's been formed by acquisitions, so we had a lot of assets spread out over different divisions," she said. "And we wanted to make it easier for advertisers to do business with us across all of our products and services--similar to what AOL has done with Platform A."