Display ads have generally been the purview of larger brand name companies who can afford the cost of creating highly visual or dynamic ads. However, Aaron Finn and his team at AdReady want to bring banner advertising to even the little guys.
AdReady is an application for managing a display advertising campaign, from creating the ads all the way to managing and tracking their progress on three main ad networks: Google, RightMedia, Advertising.com. In exchange, AdReady takes a 20% cut of your ad budget. Aaron got the idea for the site while managing a $100 million a year in ad campaigns for Classmates.com.
While normal display advertisements can take a week or two to make and cost a couple grand, AdReady lets you pick a basic set of ads (skyscrapers, banners, etc) from their library and customize it to your specifications. Ads vary by customization, but often let you place your own message, images, or logo on the units. Some are even interactive, like car ads that let you change the color of the cars in the ads. It’s like a more practical version of the Flickr photo Ad Generator we covered back in January.
But not all ads are created equal. AdReady incorporate all the best practices for ad design as well as sort the wheat from the chaff by tracking and ranking the click through rate on each ad in their inventory as customers use them. Though I imagine an extreme reliance on the data will produce a lot of generic advertising. Although a lot of the ads are rather generic to begin with by the virtue that they have to be a one size fits all solution.
After you have your ad, you tell the system your advertising budget, which it splits between Google, RightMedia, and Advertising.com’s networks based on the ad’s category and geography (i.e. car ad for San Francisco). You can take the system’s suggestion, or choose your own budget allocation. As your campaign progresses you can track the ads in AdReady’s own dashboard and tweak the units for a more effective campaign.
With Google’s purchase of DoubleClick and Yahoo’s SmartAds initiative, the focus is being drawn back on display advertising. A tool like AdReady helps even the little guys get in to the growing market. That is, unless Google does something like this too.
all those ads look like crap…I don’t think anyone would click any of them
I would consider tv ads through spot runner like program rather than banner ads.
Advert agncies sure got tough time ahead with commoditisation of Ad Work
This is a great Idea, in what is turning out to be a billion dollar market. Keep it coming!
More ads to ignore. Awesome.
This is part of the web 2.0 revolution which is happening. Consumerism directed. I know corporates are watching. But this becomes a good tool for the lay man.
http://blogkatt.blogspot.com
Well, http://rubiconproject.com is now worth a lot less.
The problem with these startups is that they all cannibalize each other. Too much money going into a too small piece of the marketshare. It’s a recipe for disaster.
I’m surprised nobody has cloned our new search concept. There’s a pending patent, but still, you know how VC is. I guess when something is really hard to code, they can’t do it. All this stuff coming out on tech crunch is something a lowly web dev programmer could do. It requires little to no computer science skils.
That’s why these sites are so plentiful.
Wow I just looked through the site and some of those ads look really good. I don’t know who their designers are but I wish I were as creative and witty…
I was going to do this but I was busy with other lowly web dev stuff. Anyway I find the site well laid out and easy to use. If the multi billion dollar industry that is web advertising is running out of money I better get started with some of my own lowly web dev! Keep on keepin’ on adready!
those ads look so crappy, who would click on it….no wonder why they are in beta
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
In response to Chris R.’s comment:
I’m the CEO and Founder of the Rubicon Project - http://rubiconproject.com
First, I think AdReady is a great, and much needed idea. There is no overlap with the Rubicon Project and what AdReady does. the Rubicon Project is a service for website publishers to monetize their ad space by optimizing 300+ ad networks all in one place. Our technology understands the strengths of each ad network and deciphers a websites inventory based on demographic, geographic and contextual information to match each ad impression to the best money-making opportunity. AdReady is a service for advertisers to create display ads and place them across these networks. The services are actually on opposite ends of the advertising industry landscape and I’d say they are complimentary.
The online advertising market today is under-served. It’s a $27Bn market in the U.S. alone, growing to $65Bn in 2011. Combine that with the growth in international markets and we’ve got a rapidly growing market that, to date, has had very little innovation. The fact is that today, 33% of consumer time is spent online, yet only 5% of advertising budgets. I personally believe it’s because it is still too hard to buy and sell advertising online.
47% of today’s online advertising market is display advertising. And is certainly an area of the market that can use some innovation. Hence, we combine the ability for websites to monetize both text and display ad space in our solution at the Rubicon Project. If a website is using only a text ad network or only a display ad network, they are missing out on half the market. They need to optimize both.
Having said that Chris, you’re right, a lot of people (and VCs) are actively pursuing this space now (for the reasons I listed above) and eventually it will likely get saturated. We’re not there yet, but when we reach that point, I believe it will the real solutions driven by real innovative technology that will rise up from the clutter.
Good Idea, but taking 20% comission is too much.
I hope all the companies in the world will just use this and make the secretary create their banner ads so us developers can get back to making cool things that actually increase their profits instead of annoy their customers. It astonishes me every day how many people just believe in banner ads even thought they don’t work at all. I assume it’s because they work just as well as print ads (which is not at all) and they haven’t noticed a difference.