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Balihoo, advertising industry’s vertical search engine, launches beta

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balihoo1.jpgBalihoo, developer of the advertising industry’s first and only vertical search engine for advertising media, announced that it has launched a broad Beta Program involving a group of companies representing more than $25 billion in U.S. media spending annually. Participants in the program include media buying firms, advertising agencies and major national advertisers.

The Balihoo search engine enables advertisers and agencies to search for media properties that are most relevant to their advertising campaigns, gather and analyze information about those properties, and interact with media owners to build and execute media plans. Balihoo works across geographies and on any media type including TV, radio, print, interactive and out-of-home.

Additional participants will be invited into the beta program as they sign-up on the Balihoo website. “Input from participants in our recently concluded demo trial stage indicates that Balihoo will provide significant time and cost savings to the media buying and planning community,” said Pete Gombert, Balihoo’s chief executive officer.

Originally posted on June 19, 2007 @ 4:47 pm

MTV Networks, Visible World partner to offer targeted dynamic advertising solutions

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mtv.jpgMTV Networks and Visible World, a video advertising technology and services company, are partnering to give advertisers the ability to dynamically customize and target video ads in real-time across MTVN’s premier U.S.-based TV channels and websites, including the MTV, MTV2, VH1, CMT, Spike TV, Comedy Central, TV Land, Nickelodeon and Nick At Nite brands. The partnership marks the most extensive national deployment of dynamic video message customization across channels, programs and audience demographics.

“Our goal is to fundamentally change the way our viewers experience advertising by giving them an innovative experience, and our partnership with Visible World gives us the leading edge,” said Judy McGrath, Chairman and CEO, MTV Networks. “Our consumers can access relevant information from our marketing partners across every screen.”

“We are excited to partner with MTV Networks to offer advertisers new strategic capabilities that optimize the effectiveness of their messaging across many platforms in this rapidly evolving media landscape,” said Tara Walpert, President of Visible World.

Visible World’s technology and services enable advertisers to target, tailor, monitor, and actively change video ads within seconds. Now, MTV
Networks’ marketing partners can pre-program and proactively edit across all channels and websites their ad content on-the-fly.

Originally posted on June 18, 2007 @ 2:09 pm

eBay pulls ads from Google’s paid search

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eBay pulls its advertising campaigns from Google‘s ad network, an untimely move that creates issues between the two internet giants, and questions among media people and analysts around the web.

About two weeks ago, a comScore study showed that e-commerce sites dominate paid search marketing, singling out eBay as the number one company who generated the most link exposures from Google Adwords in March.

Now, in spite of eBay spokeman Hani Durzy’s declaration that their move to pull off ads was a part of an ongoing experiment to look at eBay’s marketing campaigns across all media channels, some sources are saying that it was an angry reaction to Google’s plans to hold a party simultaneously with eBay’s annual conference for its merchants. Apparently, this Google event called Checkout Freedom Party is part of an effort to woo eBay to use its online payment system, the Google Checkout, instead of eBay’s Paypal.

Durzy acknowledged that eBay was disappointed about the Google event. “We don’t view that kind of activity as an appropriate activity for one partner to do to another.” Google eventually canceled the party, stating on its blog that “after speaking with officials at eBay, we at Google agreed it was better for us not to feature this event during the eBay Live conference.”

Analysts say that while the two Internet giants have been harboring issues with each other for a while now, eBay will have to reconsider its decision to pull their ads off because of Google’s wide reach to potential eBay customers.

eBay has kept its Adwords campaigns outside of the US.

Originally posted on June 14, 2007 @ 6:30 pm

Openads secures $5 million financing

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openads.jpgOpenads, developer of a free, open source adserver designed for and used by publishers worldwide, announced that it has secured $5 million Series A financing led by Index Ventures. The London-based company plans to use the funds to accelerate product development and expand its team.

Openads allows publishers to have complete control of their advertising campaigns, offering sophisticated targeting, inventory optimization, rich media and inventory forecasting from a simple yet powerful interface. Openads also allows for integration with more than 30 leading ad networks worldwide. Embraced by more than 20,000 publishers across 140 countries in 20 languages, Openads powers more publishers than all competing solutions combined.

Popular Web sites such as Federated Media and Stardoll are among those relying on Openads’ servers. “Open source has made an impact in market after market. How could we expect advertising to be otherwise,” adds Tim O’Reilly, publisher and Openads user. “Openads has quietly become a major player in the web 2.0 ad scene via its open source adserver.”

Originally posted on June 13, 2007 @ 2:09 pm

Burst Media, Reed Business launch new B2B advertising network

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reed.jpgBurst Media, provider of advertising representation services to independent web publishers, and Reed Business, a global provider of business information, announced the launch of the Reed Partner Network (RPN).

RPN provides advertisers with a fast and easy method of reaching targeted demographic and B2B audiences such as purchasing professionals, executive managers, and other company decision makers. Given Burst’s extensive network of content providers, RPN launched with a traffic potential of more than 185 million advertising impressions and 20 million unique visitors each month. RPN is fully transparent, giving publishers complete control over which advertising campaigns run on their website, while letting advertisers see all websites where their ads will appear.

“The ability to reach these prized business markets will benefit both the advertiser and the publisher of the site,” said Jarvis Coffin, founder and CEO of Burst Media. “As one of the largest business publishers in the world, Reed Business has a deep understanding of the needs of the business-to-business market. Reed’s knowledge coupled with Burst’s expertise in automating the delivery of targeted content will transform how advertisers can reach highly valued business audiences.”

Originally posted on June 12, 2007 @ 6:52 am