N
etGravity, a San
Francisco-based interactive marketing firm, has just unveiled a plan to help advertisers
reach desired targets on the Internet. Called AdServer, the software for Web sites is
intended to make Net advertising more efficient.
AdServer will allow for the automatic upload, rotation and immediate review of a
schedule's progress. And in the prebuy stage, it is a tool for Web sites to group pages by
demographic or any other category for client presentation. Typically, these groups are
then sold as a package, and an advertiser's creative is rotated with other ads on these
pages.
Brad Husick, vice president of sales and marketing, notes that many sites now use Excel
or Microsoft Word to manage ad programs. AdServer, he says, not only offers a larger
capacity for a greater number of advertisers (with AdServer, Yahoo! increased its ad spots
from five advertisers and 100 pages to 99 advertisers on 12,000), but also provides a
warranty for advertisers already frustrated with some sites' inability or unwillingness to
post logos where promised.
In beta form, AdServer was tested on Yahoo! only.
Bob Kolvin, president of Yahoo! rep Interactive Marketing Sales, sees AdServer as the
first introduction of accountability in Web advertising. "This whole medium is about
how many pages people look at each day," he notes.
Indeed, AdServer can let advertisers see the immediate run of their schedules. The
reason: the software is constantly monitoring advertiser activity within the site, so that
no spot is ever over-sold. This also means that advertisers can jump in on last-minute
buys through Space Browser, which searches the site for scattered avails. As for space
rates, using AdServer is free to advertisers, but it does create a model based on
impressions. Since the system monitors how many impressions were received per page bearing
an ad (and which ad was rotated in), Husick suggests using the system to determine the
minimum capacity of impressions based on the page's history. As advertisers near their
goals, frequency is lowered.
"It would be nice to place an ad in a site and be able to find it," remarks
John Nardone, media research director at Modem Media. He expects that AdServer will
rectify internal management at Web sites, but he's skeptical about the value of the
software's ability to increase avails.
So is Greg Stuart, vice president and director of interactive communications at
Wunderman Cato Johnson. "That can drive advertisers away and increase consumer
confusion," he notes.
(February 21, 1996)
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