We’ve recently announced Kontera’s Freedom Ad units, enabling advertisers to display In-Text ads in the shape of the product or brand they advertise. Freedom Ads received raving reviews and we wanted to share one of the more exciting success stories with this new Ad type.

Many of us are familiar with the “Quaker Man” – the gentle smile and old-world attire of the Quaker brand logo. Quaker is a household name that’s been around for over 130 years and is one of the most popular brands in the world.

Quaker needed something to reinvigorate the product and get consumers excited about oatmeal again. Kevin Ryan, of iMedia Connection, gives Kontera and OMD (Quaker’s ad agency) kudos for taking oats to the next level, making them just a little bit sexier.

Click to view demo

In an ad shaped like the Quaker Oatmeal package, that included recommended recipes, Quaker succeeded in engaging with consumers for 12 seconds (!) while they review the content of the ad, achieving Click Through Rates as high as 15.6%. The Quaker In-Text Freedom Ads delivered the highest CTR across the entire campaign, across all other media types.

Pranav Pandit, Group Director of Digital Strategy at OMD, acknowledges the success of Kontera’s In-Text advertising solution in tying unique and engaging creative with relevant context to help users connect the dots from Quaker to a rich oatmeal experience.

In-Text advertising has always delivered performance because of its superior relevancy and unobtrusiveness – as the website visitor has to trigger the launch of the ad by hovering over the highlighted keyword in the text, and the ad is closely tied and extremely relevant to the content of the page and to the user intent behind it.

In the online advertising world, where banner ads are almost universally ignored by consumers, getting extremely low click through rates of 0.7%, In-Text ads, which are actively triggered by consumers, who want to engage with the content, deliver impressive average CTR of 10% and above. In an industry measured by advertisers on conversion and campaign ROI, and by publishers on the CPC paid for each of those clicks – high CTRs and user engagement mean big business all around.

Go on, awaken your sense with Quaker oats and take a look at the demo of the Quaker Freedom Ads.

Download the presentation given at the iMedia Brand Summit on the Quaker Case Study.

Watch the short video interview with Ammiel Kamon, Kontera’s EVP Marketing, given at the iMedia Brand Summit held last month. See what makes Kontera’s In-Text advertising solution unique.

Check out more of our latest videos on YouTube

At the recent iMedia Brand Summit in Las Vegas, we announced our newest ad family: Freedom Ads.

Freedom Ads offer Kontera’s large brand advertisers a unique way of capturing the consumers’ eye and imagination, while delivering record-high engagement, brand response rates, and CTRs.

Freedom Ad units are highly-relevant rich-media in-text ads that appear in the actual form of the product they advertise – thus bringing these products to life through an engaging out-of-the-box experience.

For example, when advertising its newest mobile phone and its video capabilities, Samsung chose to have the ad itself shaped like the actual mobile device, simulating its capability to stream live video coverage of the Winter Olympics. Consumers immediately experience the Samsung phone, its unique product design and video capabilities. The ad also conveys the Olympic experience and associates the Samsung brand with the Olympic spirit.

There are two types of Freedom Ads; the Product Freedom Unit, and the Brand Freedom Unit.

The Product Freedom Unit delivers an elegant, instantly recognizable visual depiction of the advertiser’s product, directly from within a highly relevant key phrase. Product Freedom units employ a clean design, and are ideal for product focused advertisers like Consumer Packaged Goods, Automotive, Apparel, Beauty, Consumer Electronics, and Retail.

The Brand Freedom Unit brings to life elements of the brand that are instantly recognizable, and it delivers a unique and holistic brand experience through tasteful interaction that engages, educates, and delights the consumer.

In a survey conducted among 15 brands and agency teams who launched campaigns using the new Freedom Ads, all of them replied that they would use the Freedom Unit again! This great advertiser reception is indicative of positive consumer results, and it is translating into a positive financial impact for Kontera’s publishers.

Other advertisers that have used the new Freedom Ads include FedEx, Adobe, the Republic of Ireland and Curel. See these campaigns and experience the Freedom Ads for yourself on our demonstration page.

You can also check out some of our additional Freedom Ads resources:

• The Official Kontera Press Release
• Freedom Ads Covered on MediaPost
• Download the PowerPoint presentation presented at iMedia Brand Summit
• See this and other Ad types in The Kontera Ad Gallery
• Watch the short video interview with Ammiel Kamon, Kontera’s EVP marketing, given at the iMedia Brand Summit about the future of in-text advertising

You may already know that the year you were born is considered the year of the rat, ox, or horse according to the ancient Chinese zodiac.  What you probably didn’t know yet, is that at Kontera, we’ve proclaimed 2010 as the year of relevancy.

What does this mean for our partners?  Well, it’s pretty simple, higher relevancy means that:

• Publishers don’t sell out their users to irrelevant ad exposure and are not hurting their users’ experience. Happy users mean increased traffic, time on site, and loyalty.
• Higher CTR – as you get paid by the click, more clicks means more money for your website
• Advertisers don’t have ads served to users who aren’t interested, thus getting high conversion on their campaign

Essentially everyone profits!

Relevancy is a mark at Kontera that we take very seriously.  Our relevancy efforts start at the “story-level” targeting where we interpret the meaning of the page then matching it with contextual ads that are the most relevant ones.

One measure of relevancy is in the form of a metric called CTR.  CTR or click through rate is a frequency ratio between the number of times an ad is viewed and the number of times it gets clicked on.  Experts agree that as the net becomes increasingly more built up, advertising campaigns that were formerly effective may not hold effectiveness.   In fact, recent statistics indicate that classic banner ads carry a mere .07% CTR rate bringing further understanding to the rise in the phrase “banner blindness”.  In contrast, ads on the Kontera network are characterized by starting click through rates that exceed 10% with some campaigns reaching upwards of 14% (!).

CTR is just one measure of a publisher’s ad performance, but is one of the most honest ways to gauge user satisfaction and interest.  Many publishers  find that after testing with other In-Text ad networks, their user experience suffers and many users desert their site due to the low relevancy threshold so be sure not to compromise when it comes to relevancy.

The next time you read your zodiac sign at your local Chinese restaurant, be sure to remember 2010 as not only the year of the tiger but also as Kontera’s commitment to relevancy.

Many of our publishers are interested in expanding their partnership with Kontera by adding more sites to our network. As you already know, to do so, there’s no need to open another account. All you have to do is to contact our Support Team by logging into your account in the Publisher Center and clicking on the “Help” tab. We will quickly review your additional sites and create a unique tag for each site associated with your Kontera account.

Using a unique tag for each one of your sites is important as it enables us to separately track individual performance, as well as make sure that the tag settings are fully optimized to specifically match your sites’ attributes. By using the correct tag you ensure that we’ll provide you with the best and most relevant ad targeting for your site’s content niche and structure.

Say that when you first signed-up to join Kontera, you applied with your computing related blog. A few weeks later, you decided to add your forum which deals with mobile phones as well as your extreme sports site to your Kontera account. While our contextual analysis technology analyzes each page in real-time to identify its topics and main Keywords, some of the ad settings are changes by our Optimization Team. These tweaks are based on each site’s performance, traffic trends, length of its pages, content niche etc. Needless to say that by using the same tag across multiple and diverse sites will result in your missing out on the benefits of this optimization.

Having accurate knowledge of each of your sites’ individual performance is important as it provides us with a clear indication if everything is running smoothly, or if further optimization is required. As a publisher this gives you the option to customize yourKontera ads and detailed reporting. With separate tracking you can accurately analyze your sites’ metrics, which as we all know, is a well known hobby within the internet community