What makes an effective brand advertising campaign?

That was the core question at “The Ad Effectiveness X-Factor” panel, held last week as part at the 8th annual Advertising Week in Manhattan. Moderated by Kontera’s own EVP of Marketing, Ammiel Kamon, the esteemed speakers were Jason Krebs the CMO of Tremor Media; Sean O’Neal, the CRO of Vizu;  Joe Zawadzki,  the CEO of MediaMath; Florian Kahlert , SVP of Dimestore; and Kontera President Hal Muchnick.

Each industry insider shared an internal case study that provided a unique perspective on brand media strategies for either video, social, editorial placement, or display audience buying. Here are some of the key takeaways:

• Always measure the success of a brand campaign by real time brand lift, not by clicks.
• With online in-stream video, it’s not enough to syndicate TV ads, adding interactive elements will dramatically increase engagement.
• The best day for brand lift varies by vertical. For instance with hair products, Wednesday is the best day, while Sunday is the worst.
• You can save as much as $100,000 in buy effectiveness by optimizing a campaign in real time. Depending on when you start getting stable data, you can start optimizing within a day.
• Video is very hot right now and showing particular lift for CPG brands.

Another repeated theme during the panel was how placement matters for engagement. Aside from Hal Muchnick’s presentation on Kontera’s Ritz crackers/Glee Social ad unit, both the Vizu and Dimestore case studies spoke directly to the effectiveness Kontera’s contextual ads. For instance, in their brand study of a leading over the counter pain reliever, Vizu found that Kontera’s Editorial Placed units significantly outperformed the portal and endemic sites running the same campaign.

It truly was a fascinating discussion and well worth checking out. You can see video of the entire panel here.

One great technology platform, now two great networks.

Kontera is proud to announce the official launch of INTENTclick, the premier direct response In-Text network. INTENTclick differs from Kontera’s flagship brand network, in that it’s optimized to meet the specific needs of direct response advertisers and quality publishers in the “Save Money” and “Better Income” verticals. INTENTclick will be expended for additional content categories in the future.

Both networks utilize Kontera’s Synapse Platform, which provides advanced semantic analysis, along with real-time web trend and user context analysis, to predict consumers’ interests and intent. However, INTENTclick has an ad inventory that’s especially effective for monetizing SEO driven content covering the topics of saving or making money. Here are the advantages for both Publishers and Performance Advertisers:

For publishers, INTENTclick delivers:

• Exclusive in-text placements
• Thousands of offers
• Incremental monetization
• Easy setup – for a single site or a network of sites

For performance advertisers INTENTclick delivers:

• Superior optimization
• High conversion
• Precise Targeting for a qualified audience
• Exclusive in-text inventory
• Flexible ad formats (text and rich media)
• Dedicated account management

Kontera SEO Yoav Shaham further elaborates on why now is right time to launch a second in-text network:

“As a technology company with multiple offerings and a rapidly expanding footprint, we’ve scaled to a level where we can effectively manage multiple products, multiple market segments, and multiple networks. This segmentation of networks gives us the power and flexibility, to fully serve both brand advertisers and direct response advertisers, in the unique ways that satisfy their differing campaign objectives.”

As Yoav touched upon, INTENTclick is just the latest in a series of new products Kontera Technologies has released in the last six months. Along with INTENTclick, Kontera has also introduced Mobile Solutions and the acclaimed Social Boost family of products, further cementing Kontera’s position as an industry leader, and valued partner for both Advertisers and Publishers.

You want to make money from your website without the risk of driving your traffic away.  Kontera has the In-Text advertising solution that pledges to:

• Not clutter your pages.
• Not trash your text.
• Bring your readers the relevancy that they deserve.
• Showcase brands that mean business.
• Keep the network clean in order to welcome big brands-meaning unique high paying advertisements.
• Maintain tight integration between your content and your users’ intent delivering record high CTR.
• Provide value to users and publishers.
• Serve fewer links per page while delivering strong campaign performance. (Also check out mediapost.com)
• Offer you a sustainable revenue stream that you can bank on.
• Bring you the premier In-Text Advertising experience.

Our unbeatable contextual technology delivers results without compromising on quality and your users.

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.

We see no better time than the holidays to introduce a brand new program for online publishers. If you own a website or a blog we invite you to benefit from the following promotion that we are glad to announce today:

Kontera Pays Double for Your Clicks!

Join Kontera this holiday season and we’ll match your first month earnings, so as a special holiday bonus you’ll be EARNING DOUBLE. Joining is a snap:

1. Sign-up with Kontera.
2. Implement the Kontera tag on your site or blog and start earning right away.
3. EARN DOUBLE your first month -whatever you’ll earn during your first month we’ll match!*

Sign-Up Now!»

How will it work?
We’re joining in on the holiday cheer – There’s no top limit we’ll match your earnings dollar for dollar!  

This limited-time offer is valid only for publisher sign-ups through the promotional link so don’t miss out on this great opportunity and sign-up now!»

Happy holidays everyone.

* Offer is valid only for sign-ups through the promotional link
* Bonus valid for earnings over $10 per publisher
* Visit the promotion’s Terms & Conditions page.