Halogen Network

and Ad Networks, at least vertical ad networks, like Halogen Publishers, need a new name. I have talked about this before, and this article in the NYTimes seems to highlight the confusion, in terms of what an ad network really does.

So what’s going on? Basically, large publishers (often established media brands) have realized they have created a problem for their own sales force and business model. They typically sell the best inventory themselves (at $10-50cpm’s) and dump a lot of unsold inventory into blind ad networks, that offer the space to advertisers at $2cpm’s or less. At some point, media buyers wise up and realise that they can find the same branded publisher inventory in an ad network, and not pay the huge premium to buy direct.

This is going to change, as publishers start to choke off the supply of inventory to these remnant ad networks – and then allow “higher-end” ad networks to sell their unsold space – since most big publishers usually don’t sell more than 50% of their own ads. What does a “high-end” ad network do:

-sell advertising to clients and their agencies via a direct sales force – not a self-serve dashboard – and at close to rate card.

-come up with and execute creative campaigns on behalf of advertisers that leverage many of the publishers in the same network.

-disclose the publisher sites that the advertising will run on – what’s known as a transparent network.

This is what the creates a new opportunity for luxury marketers. Find those premium ad networks that represent smaller, but high-quality publishers – and leverage their combined audience and the creativity of the ad network team to execute effective, large-scale campaigns. Bottomline: the affuent audience is all over the web now, not just concentrated in sites like wsj.com or nytimes.com, and a premium ad network can help reach that audience. Examples of premium ad networks (or publisher alliances): Federated Media, Shorttail Media, Halogen Publishers – and I am sure, more to come.