It's striking to think that anything about online has become traditional. Using techniques already tried and tested offline -- contextual-based buying -- marketers have built a traditional model for reaching their consumers. Contextual buying has three huge benefits. First, it allows you to associate your brand with a media brand that is valued by your audience. Next, it ensures (with some stomach churning exceptions) that you are reaching people who care about your product's category. Finally, it can ensure that your brand is seen as a serious option because you are running right alongside your competition in context.

The major downside is that your consumer may be so enthralled with the content or your competitor's ads that you get lost. That is why many successful contextual marketers choose one major site to develop unique creative ownership opportunities, like sponsorships or content integrations, to get the benefits of contextual placement while making sure their brand stands out.

Let's look at the case of a new mainstream video game launch. According to the Entertainment Software Association, 69 percent of American heads of household play computer and video games.

The largest publisher of game info online is IGN.com, which reaches about 24 percent of all online gamers. Even if you bought a contextual sponsorship on every page of the best website in the category, you would miss three-fourths of the people who are interested in games. If you expand your plan and take massive sponsorships of the top three sites that reach gamers (IGN.com, gamespot.com and AOL Games), you can reach about 42 percent of all people online who visit game information. In order to reach all the people who visit game information, you lose the ability to do sponsorships on every page. But with some creative rich media and a big enough budget, you can add massive reach against your target. For example, by adding Advertising.com's Games channel to the plan above, you would now reach 96 percent of all people who read gaming content online.

This layered approach definitely reaches almost all the gamers online. However, it doesn't do anything about the people who buy games but don't visit gaming websites.