ChasNote

Joe Marchese’s guest post at MediaPost explores the conflict between the search-ad networks’ desire to expand their market from CPC direct-response advertisers into the larger market of CPM-paying brand advertisers. What has made Google and the others successful to date, according to Joe, is “relevancy,” — delivering ads that match the content on the page so that readers experience the ads as content — not traditional “targeting.” But brand advertisers want targeting, they want to coax prospective buyers into considering their products before they start researching those products on their own. To get in front of that prospective Prius driver before he or she starts thinking about a new car, brand advertisers need to target audiences based on a demographic or psychographic profile.

“So what is the missing link between the brand advertiser’s need to increase reach online, television’s reach/ad value being increasingly compromised, and search ad networks’ desire to attract these brand advertisers’ online budgets? The link is a whole new system for determining relevancy of brand advertisements–a system that will create a market for brand advertisements and facilitate the rethinking of the advertising ecosystem, taking into account brand advertisement goals as well as the intentions of the ecosystem’s participants and their effects on a market for brand advertisements.”

At FM, we use a human-powered system to bring relevancy to targeted brand advertising campaigns. It works like this: Brand advertisers buy space on FM partner sites based on demographics, psychographics and content fit, and then — not always, but more and more often — those brand advertisers are inviting FM’s authors (or their readers) to shape the creative messages. The marketers target the ads; the media creators and consumers make those ads relevant.