SmartADs: Bridging the Gap Between Research and Advertising

As publishers face advertisers clamoring for “measured media,” a service called SmartAds may offer some help.

iiON Corp.’s SmartAds technology lets viewers interact with advertisements by posing questions or offers, then serving up information or images tailored to that viewer based on their responses without taking the viewer away from the site. Advertisers get access to not just clickthrough rates but also demographic information such as age and product preferences depending on the questions served by the ad.

“Web 3.0 will be all about interactivity and getting a personalized experience as opposed to being led away from what you’re looking at,” iiON Corp. founder and CEO Roy DiBenerdini told FOLIO:.

SmartAds are Flash-based and can be embedded directly into items ranging from content to banners to Web pages and video players or digital editions. Television network CBS ran a SmartAds campaign with advertiser Natural Balance Dog Food which yielded a 2.4 percent clickthrough.

Several publishers are evaluating SmartADs, including Advanstar, which is integrating SmartAds into proposals to key accounts. ‘We have gotten positive feedback so far,” says Dana Fisher, director of electronic products, with Advanstar’s Powersports group. “Since we’re in the that ‘in-between’ time of year when budgets are mostly gone and 2009 budgets have not yet been released, we don’t know yet how many of our advertisers will choose to include SmartADs in their programs. But with increased pressure on marketers to prove the value of their online programs and metrics, SmartAds fits that challenge with a good solution.”

DiBenerdini says publishers can charge a higher CPM for campaigns equipped with SmartAds because of the data collecting ability. If traffic to a site is 1.2 million unique visitors or less, publishers can expect to pay about $2,500 for a month of SmartAds. iiON Corp is also talking about making the solution available to ad networks on a wide-ranging basis for about $300,000 per year.

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