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EPS Newsletter praises commercial value of Connextra's new contextual ad technologyOctober 24th 2001 - News item EPS Update Note: 24 October 2001 The information will come later. In the post-dotcom world, the feeling that contextualised search engines, from Antonomy's Kenjin to Connextra's Sidewize, have still to find their niche is now widespread. Everyone recognises the value: no one wants to pay for it. Yet the value of context is big business, and if you can experiment long enough you can find where big business applications are to be found. Connextra is fortunate: it has been at it long enough to do its homework, and it has found the critical application before the funding expired. The application is ActiveAd, and it simply allows advertisers to contexualise their advertising to the page of information that you are using. Simple. Exactly what we thought we would be doing with interactive advertising in 1996. But we never got round to it, until now. How powerful can this be? You are looking at the Chelsea FC site, and the banner contextualises to offer you the odds on Chelsea staying in the Premiership, or to offer you one of the last five inflatable Ken Bates toys still available in stock. The same ads contextualise to every other football site. You look at Westlife on Dotmusic and the banner contextualises to the special offer on the CD - and as with the other offers, you click through to purchase. For early ActiveAd customers - DooYoo, QXL, WhatsOnWhen - this is powerful medicine. For another early client, OddsChecker, it means the ability to serve bettable odds from 17 betting brands to a punter just at the point when they are engaged in the judgement call on their team's chances. TeamTalk, the football site portal, indicates that ActiveAd has served 30,000 dynamically-created advertisements a day with contextual reliance to its user, each of which presented an immediate click-and-buy (or bet, in this case) option. The prospects here in betting, travel, e-commerce (especially books, music and videos) and even areas like e-learning are clearly significant. In times when, despite ever-rising online usage figures, selling any advertising is hard, this huge value-add must be significant. It should be significant to publishers and portal owners as well. In the deepening love affair between users and their home on the network, all of those contestants for portal status want to make the user feel uniquely valued. Rather than flash obtrusive offerings for irrelevant products and services at users, services like MSN will be able to ensure that every ad which appears in front of users is relevant to what they are currently doing - a huge relaxation of the uncreative tension of intrusive web advertising. Connextra, which offers ActiveAd across a range of scaleable options - from a bureau basis on its own server to a licensed software deal for major players - has clearly hit a rich vein in value-add: by the time it has fully exploited it, the rest of the market will be ready for the contextual search services that sparked all of this in the first place. by David Worlock (drw@epsltd.com) |