With ad:tech San Francisco kicking off tomorrow, we wanted to share a bit more about our vision as we prepare to expand our platform and take it to the next level.
Today online advertising often fails to serve the changing needs of medium-sized publishers. Ad agencies can place premium ads on the biggest sites, but do not have an efficient way to reach the smaller niche sites across the Web. On the other hand, ad networks do a great job of selling remnant inventory, but often leave advertisers with little control over where, when, and to whom their ads appear. These approaches benefit the extremes - the largest sites and the smallest sites - but not the brands and mid-size websites with valuable audiences.
Adroll challenges the status quo of traditional online advertising (just a bit). We’ve developed a relevant way for advertisers to target interested audiences across related websites. Adroll delivers a bottom up approach, allowing sites to group organically around interests and affinities, and market them to advertisers. This simple solution serves the websites with great audiences, many of whom fall into “the middle” of the long tail.
The vision is that this model is a better, simpler, more efficient way to deliver brand advertising for specialized sites. Publishers who use Adroll.com can command better CPMs for their audiences because Adroll.com enables the newly formed groups to sell sponsorships and ad space directly and leverage each other’s sales resources… and our sales resources as well.
For advertisers, Adroll offers greater transparency and control over when and where their brand appears online, and greater access to highly desirable targeted audiences.
It’s probably early still to call Adroll a platform… but we’re off to a great start — more than 100 communities have been formed, and thousands of tags are used to help sites (and their audiences) become discovered and sponsored. We look forward to sharing some more news and new features in the next few days, so stay tuned.
4 Comments
Hi Jared,
I will first say that I like the idea of Adroll. I think that is has some potential. I do want to comment on one thing. Ad agencies generally don’t have much to say as to how media is decided upon these days. They can be consulted with, however, by and large, you can be sure that the media agencies have much more sway over what is decided on when it comes to spending on media. Global corporations often have pre-arranged deals with media agencies, offset against the budgets that they have allocated for media spend.
There’s a feeling from the perspective of digital and ad agencies that too much control and or influence is placed in the hands of the media agencies. They book media where they feel that they will get the best return on the investments that their clients are making. As banners are still immensely popular, on heavily trafficked sites, there is still some frustration from those of us who ‘know better’ and want a more effective, more relevant way of communicating with target audiences.
Personally, I feel that media should be thought of first, before any campaign lifts off the ground. A sort of “know where you want to go and then plan towards going there” type approach. This however, in the big business scenario, would mean that media agencies as they currently stand, would further entrench their position. Something that ad and digital agencies might not necessarily want to entertain the thought of happening. So there’s a standoff.
I also feel, having had a look around Blogroll, that actually bigger brands might be more interested in engaging with Blogroll, if they knew about Blogroll. People act on what they know about and I’m pretty sure, that certain big brands would be more than keen to get involved.
Nice work. Hope you enjoy ad:tech San Francisco. I’m jealous! :)
Greetings from Amsterdam,
Lyndon
Congrats on launching this great service that is badly needed by niche sites like mine.
I look forward to testing out your service and love the community traffic idea as well because all niche sites face the issues of increasing traffic and monetizing it effectively.
Keep up the great work and best of luck with ad:tech. If you come to ad:tech Miami I will check out your booth.
Having started an ad community on adroll I’d love to be able to pitch it to advertisers the same way I can for just my site. Are you working on this at the moment?
Currently it seems like the only way to sell the community is to have an advertiser come to you rather then the other way around.
Hi Adam,
Thanks for the feedback. Making it easier for publishers to market and sell ad space across their communities is something that we will continually improve upon.
At the moment, a community leader can already set pricing on their community, and direct potential advertisers to their community’s profile page. For example, here’s the profile page for your music community: http://www.adroll.com/communities/musicrant. This will show the advertiser traffic stats for the community, as well as detailed traffic and audience data. Advertisers can also create a campaign and buy ad space in one click form the community profile page.
Thanks again for your input, and let us know if you have any further thoughts.
Adam Berke
VP of Community Development
Adroll.com