Another bite at the apple
By a long shot, Yureekah, which so far is free, isn't the only competitive intelligence offering on the market. Companies like Adgooroo, Balihoo and Syntryx all attempt to serve the demand for competitive intelligence -- for a fee.
According to Assaf Igell, VP of channel partners at Syntryx, a great many of the company's clients use the service to get an independent view of ad networks they're either working with or assessing.
"A very popular use of our service is to qualify the blind networks to make sure that their media buy is accountable," Igell explains. "You don't know where your ad will appear and a lot of our clients use the system for compliancy and accountability as well as to compare between networks."
But to do that, Igell says Syntryx takes a more holistic approach to intelligence than does Yureekah, which for now is focusing solely on banners.
"We're not trying to deliver exact traffic estimates," Igell says. "What we do is monitor the economic relationships on the web. How active is an advertiser? Where are they putting in their ads and how robust is their economic activity?"
To address these questions, Igell says Syntryx looks not just at banners, but at search, email and a slew of other channels to get a more complete picture. According to Igell, Syntryx gets its data from more than 1.5 million publishers operating across all ad networks.
That may only be a slice of what's out there, but for media buyers looking for actionable intelligence in the planning phase of their campaign or a second opinion on data from their ad networks, it may be a place to start.
Attention, creative shoppers
While no one doubts the need for good intelligence, there are a multitude of reasons why you might want the information -- and indeed an infinite number of questions to be asked.
By and large, the primary questions for most advertisers seem to be driven by quantifiable factors -- where is a competitor advertising and how often are they doing so?
But if the task presented is largely a creative question -- say you want to know what worked and what didn't for advertisers in the same category -- Eyeblaster, a rich media company, seems to think it has a good place to look.
Drawing on the myriad of creatives that come its way, Eyeblaster recently launched Creative Zone, a kind of forum where advertising professionals can view and critique good (and bad) banners. While the forum may not offer up-to-the-minute insights on what's out there now, it's certainly a hub for banner creatives.
While that intelligence may not be immediately actionable for media buyers, it is a unique space to host creatives that often make their way to a digital graveyard shortly after a campaign runs its course.
Nobody said there was going to be this much homework
If there's an abiding lesson in all of this, it's that media buyers may need to know more than any one solution can really provide.
That may be a disconcerting notion for many in the industry, given the high likelihood that good information may be out of reach because you simply didn't know who -- or what -- to ask.
While all digital professionals struggle to find actionable information in an increasingly fragmented and always imperfect world, one nearly ironclad solution may be as simple as redundancy. That doesn't mean using every product under the sun, but it does mean getting a second -- and perhaps even a third -- opinion on the mountains of data generated on the web everyday.
Editor's note: If you are a media buyer or a digital professional who relies on actionable intelligence, please feel free to comment and share your experiences and advice with the iMedia community.
Michael Estrin is associate editor at iMedia Connection.