Banner ads have been a staple of online advertising, but they haven’t exactly been the most enthralling performers, even earning the affectionate nickname “brand awareness Black Hole.” OneSpot is a company that’s trying to put a new spin on banner ads, and it just got $1.5 million to help its cause. The content-advertising company is in pursuit of fulfilling its hope of transforming content on websites into display ads targeted at specific consumers. This will, ideally, drive click-through rates up.
In its previous iteration, OneSpot raised $4.2 million to create a system to find top stories for specific topics based on linking patterns. Obviously, that didn’t work out.
“With OneSpot 2.0 (if you will), advertisers can create contextual banner ads simply by taking the web address and dropping it into the ad dashboard. It will extract the content from there, along with images and create a simple ad that can be A/B tested before being shared to the 20 exchanges the service has partnered with, including Google and Microsoft – making up 400,000 impressions accessed per second.”
The first time a user visits a OneSpot site, they’ll be tracked with a cookie that will deliver customized, retargeted ads on other sites. These retargeted ads will hit users in the “funnel” to prod them toward a specific action.
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