AdCenter : What Would Jack Bauer Say?

THE FOLLOWING WILL TAKE PLACE BY MID-YEAR, 2006:

Listen to me, okay? What I’m going to tell you is very, very important: being top banana in search doesn’t mean anything. Don’t click away, I’m serious, you’ve got to believe me. Quick, run a check on Excite.com – you must, no one else can. I can’t reach Edgar and I think Chloe went out last night – we don’t have time to find her. You’ll see that five or six years ago, Excite was the biggest thing in search. But where are they today? Nowhere. I’m telling you, the search world is a brutal, take-no-prisoners environment for those who fall out of favor – and why wouldn’t it be, seeing what’s at stake?

From ICMediaDirect.com’s secret location in the Empire State Building (whoops) I’ve made a positive ID on a new major player, adCenter – and I believe they want a piece of CTU. (That’s “Content Targeting Users”, another way of saying the contextual ad market – you read this term for the first and possibly last time here.) It’s too late to neutralize adCenter, it’s already testing in Beta format, but you should at least familiarize yourself with it before it’s everywhere.

Research indicates that adCenter is an offshoot of MSN, a formidable tech outfit from the Pacific Northwest. And adCenter had better be good because it’s faced with a daunting mission, to crack the paid search market.

adCenter’s main goal, since it will be integral to their business plan, is to make themselves attractive to advertisers. As you know, there are many advertisers who’ve already vested themselves fully in search advertising, and their numbers are growing daily. You won’t need clearance to check these numbers. Intelligence has online advertising and search, in particular, in a growth pattern through at least 2010.

Search’s success is rooted in its amorphous flexibility and the deviousness of adCenter is that it will succeed by granting advertisers more opportunity to target their audience.

adCenter will let advertisers:

• Steer ads demographically based on keyword selection.

• Peruse through suggested keywords based on the contents of their own site.

• Scroll through an audience profiler to assists in likely search terms used by desired users.

• Oh, this one is huge, a Cost Estimator for advertisers. adCenter wants to help advertisers stick within budget through rank, traffic, and cost estimations per keyword. adCenter wants to grow by relinquishing informational control over advertising budgets. Interesting.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a subway to catch. Whatever you do, don’t look for me, I’ll find you and if I can’t maybe adCenter will.