Curated by: Luigi Canali De Rossi
 


Thursday, June 8, 2006

Sell Direct Advertising On Your Site While Bathing Under The Sun: Adify Serves Automated Online Ad Management For Web Publishers

Sponsored Links

Do you want to automate the entire direct advertising sales process for your web site?

Would you see as a definite advantage the ability to sell directly to your potential advertisers, setting prices and terms?

sun_bathing_id32963_size350o.jpg
Photo credit: Alex Bramwell

The time when you can finally control and manage all of your on-site advertising offers from one location, while setting prices, position, size and look and feel, has finally come.

A new online service allows you to not only sell directly your online advertising space but also to manage in a simple and direct way your own, much simplified, automated ad management system.

Yes, there was Blogads, AdBrite and many others, offering to be your virtual online ad agencies, with a la carte menus offering your ad space to small and medium-sized publishers.

Yes self-service operation for would-be advertisers is nothing new either, as from Google AdWords to Blogads most direct to-site advertising agencies base their success on immediacy and ease of use.

So, what is it that makes this brand new online direct advertising service offer that makes it so special and unique?

The new service is called Adify and its mantra revolves around the following mandala:

Adify_key_propositions_350.gif

The unique set of propositions that makes Adify a better match than existing online ad services for small and medium sized online publishers, business, pro-bloggers and independent news sites sits in its ability to provide this unique set of tools and facilities which support online publishers by allowing them to (-compared with Blogads):

a) Identify and select the type of ad formats you want to run on your site

Adify_graphical_ad_sizes.gif

Big, small, text or image, ad or sponsorship, you have direct control on selecting the specific ad formats, styles and placement that you want to enable on your web site(s). Adify gives publishers the flexibility to choose from IAB-standard text and graphic ads.
- Blogads gives you essentially only one ad type.



b) Sell advertising space the way YOU want
With Adify you can be as "granular" as you want to be, selling advertising spaces on individual pages or on whole sections of your site at different prices.
- Blogads doesn't offer this out of the box - to customize it to do so it takes some of your own effort and being originally conceived for letting small advertisers buy ad space across all pages of a blog, is not really designed to be stretched this much.



c) Select the pricing model
CPC or CPM? It's fully up to you to select what is the most appropriate pricing model to offer your advertising customers.
- Not available on Blogads



d) Set the actual prices

Adify_set_pricing.gif

Make final prices on each of your ad space offerings, and differentiate price based on 1-day, 1-week or 1-month time blocks. Adify lets you always set the minimum pricing you are willing to accept for ads.
- Blogads is still better on this front offering more options



e) Create in-house ads

Adify_in_house_ads.gif

Create multiple in-house ads that can be used when you available ad space not utilized by direct advertisers.
- Blogads allows the use of in-house ads but it does not help you create them.



f) Implement ad code easily

Adify_HTML_code.gif

Deploy newly created ad spaces by simply copying and pasting a snippet of code into your HTML page templates (much like you do with Google AdSense).
- Blogads is on a par with Adify



g) Get a professionally-looking web page to sell advertising space on your site

For potential advertisers that happen to visit your site, the option of having an easy to update page with all of your advertising information is always handy. Better yet if the information can be easily updated and if you can make the page look as much as possible as the rest of your site. And Adify provides all of this. Format your advertising store-front to obtain the integration, identity coordination or visual impact you deem most effective for your online site.
- Blogads doesn't offer this.



h) Let Adify take care of the nasty admin parts
Adify can take care of billing, ad serving, tracking, reporting, and collecting payments.
- Blogads is on a par with Adify



j) Maintain control of the conversation
You maintain control over your brand during the sales process, and maintain a direct relationship with your advertisers. Something that doesn't happen with Blogads and similar services.
- Blogads doesn't offer this.



k) Decide which products and services to endorse and promote

Adify_main_site_menu.gif

You can now decide which ads to accept or decline, increasing the value of your web site by potentially providing a more consistent and editorially coordinated advertising lineup. Contrary to what some online marketers would initially believe, coherency and relevancy of products advertised is much more important to readers than quantity or variety of ads.
- Blogads is on a par with Adify



i) Get the lion share of your hard work
you keep 80% of the ad revenue. Adify charges an Advertising Deployment & Delivery ("ADD") Fee of 20% for powering your storefront and related services. Adify's 20% "ADD" fee includes all the operational services to support the storefront, as well as the billing and credit card processing fees. Also to note that there are no upfront fees to create an Adify storefront.
- Blogads keeps 30% of your revenue - that is 10% more



l) Easy to use
Adify is well designed, easy-to-use and stupid-proof. You need not be a geek to use it and you can start setting up your ad spaces and prices immediately.
- Blogads has never shined for its usability - some things are just out of whack and not everything is immediately accessible where you expect it to be



m) Professionaly designed
Adify looks and feels right right out of the box
- If there has been a major limitation in my appreciation of Blogads as a truly professional service - I can wait one year, two... but if Blogads always look like it is in Beta with an interface that betrays legibility, organization and usability on every front, that really is a way to ask for comments like these.

In two words, Adify can automate the entire direct advertising sales process for your web site in a matter of minutes going well beyond the successful tracks laid out before it by other popular advertising services like Blogads.



How to use Adify?

To start using it the process is very simple:

1) You sign-up

2) Identify and create ad spaces that you want to sell

3) Set pricing and terms

4) Copy and paste code on your selected web pages

5) Let Adify do the rest (manage transactions, collect payments, send you a monthly payment)

6) Promote your ad offers via your custom storefront



Key benefits

The key benefit of Adify for online independent publishers is that it puts them again in the driver seat, allowing them to dictate which brands, products and services should be given premium placement on their valuable web site real estate.

Adify makes it easy for independent online publishers to create a bigger match between their advertising communications and their own communication style, focus and editorial direction while fully leveraging their greater knowledge and understanding of their own niche audiences (and their specific interests).

Obviously Adify provides matching tools also to advertisers and online marketers who want to utilize Adify future fast-growing network of web sites, blogs and news sites to deliver their messages to a much more targeted demographic while offering a truly unbeatable cost-performance ratio.

As mentioned above, Adify makes its money by keeping 20% of your sold advertising inventory on a monthly basis. The rest Adify sends to you by either PayPal or check.



Where can Adify further improve?

Here a few initial suggestions:

1) Give more options. E.g.: Special pricing options, coupons, discount offerings.

2) Ad time blocks should be both pre-set but also fully customizable as to allow online publishers to set special duration campaigns and allow them to better satisfy customer requests.

3) Facilitate when possible direct communication between publisher and advertiser.



Where to look further ahead:

From my viewpoint the next step to be made in the future of online advertising, is the virtualization of ads and I am not sure of who yet will be first on the start line on this front.

Virtual ads are ads that can be grabbed from online publishers and used across any electronic media they wish and in the formats and sizes they prefer.

Virtual ads are selected by publishers for publication on their sites, exactly the opposite of what happens today where advertisers and marketers select themselves the sites and venues in which to advertise. In this reverse modality it is now the "venue", the marketing channel itself that comes to select the ads, product and services it wants to endorse and carry.

Virtual ads have a micro-intelligence of their own and report back home anywhere they go.

The idea is not new and is not mine, but it is there. Depending on what the original advertiser decided, the ads themselves record their impression, location, placement and report back home the value of their existence in front of the eyes of many viewers.

This way, if you as an online publisher register with the one of the (yet to come) ad directory/clearinghouses providing access to such virtual ads, you are automatically credited for any inventory you have selected to carry on your pages, based on a number of factors.

It's a fascinating proposition, and one that in my opinion will give the best return for the money to advertisers while allowing online publishers the tremendous advantage of not being "slaves" to their own advertisers anymore.


"An underlying assumption is publishers can do a better job optimizing ad performance on their sites if they control the ads. This means publishers must take control of optimization from the ad-broker networks and lead-generation companies. Currently, those companies buy "remnant" inventory on publisher sites at "low-end" CPM (define) rates. They then target and optimize performance-based advertising within that inventory to generate CPM rates significantly above what they paid for the inventory.

Media owners of all types have long lamented ad brokers and marketing service companies buy their media, optimize it, then don't share the margins. Print publishers and TV stations can't do anything about it, but Web publishers can. Sell-side advertising would greatly complement CPM-based brand advertising and could become a significant revenue channel.

Media companies embracing sell-side advertising would focus their efforts on attracting, aggregating, and retaining only an audience that's highly convertible in performance-based advertising.

Ad sales efforts would shift to seeking and selecting just the right ads for their audience and environments, not just any ads. Sellers will become seekers.

Advertisers would create large pools of ads designed to deliver measurable performance. They would "tag" those ads with relevant targeting and performance metrics, such as offer, target audience, target context, desired results, timing, desired volume, and price. After selecting appropriate ads and "registering" them with the advertisers, publishers would distribute and target these ads on their sites, leveraging proprietary data about their audience and site to maximize ad performance. Ads that worked well would get more volume; those that didn't would be pulled. In this model, the publisher becomes the marketing service company. It would not only know the true value of its audience to marketers, it would control and own it."
(Source: Clickz -
Dave Morgan - February 10, 2005)

It is also my strong feeling that publishers could maximize much more effectively the publisher - advertiser brand relationship. The publisher has no interest in running ads that don't perform well for the advertiser and the advertiser gets an army of specialized marketing agents working intelligently at delivering those commercial to the most relevant and interested niche audiences out there.



Learn more

Trying out Adify is absolutely free, and even when you decide as an online publisher to go serious with it, you have no direct expense to incur.

Go check it out.

If you are an advertiser, wanting to find out more about taking advantage of Adify network of sites, you need to submit a direct request to Adify.

logo_adify_large.gif

 
 
 
Readers' Comments    
blog comments powered by Disqus
 
posted by Robin Good on Thursday, June 8 2006, updated on Tuesday, May 5 2015


Search this site for more with 

  •  

     

     

     

     

    5641




     




    Curated by


    Publisher

    MasterNewMedia.org
    New media explorer
    Communication designer

     

    POP Newsletter

    Robin Good's Newsletter for Professional Online Publishers  

    Name:
    Email:

     

     
    Real Time Web Analytics