Leveraging other people's assets
In a lot of ways, the internet is the great equalizer, allowing David to compete with Goliath on a daily basis. But sometimes the little guys need backup, and they don't always have the budget, time, or ability to staff up in a hurry.
No problem. A lot of ad networks look a lot like ad agencies (in fact, some are owned by ad agencies), with in-house creative teams that are able to serve their client's custom needs. And in a tough economy, those services can often be bundled with a media buy or, in some cases, provided for free. That's a big deal, according to Keith Wilson, director of display media at The Search Agency, who says that the right ad network can help a small buyer leverage assets that would otherwise be unavailable to him.
"[At times] ad networks have provided gratis creative optimization to increase the effectiveness of the ad for us," Wilson explains. "Not only did we avoid the risk [of making creative], we got to work with their creative group on testing creative techniques to increase [performance]. [In that instance] the network truly operated as a partner, not as a vendor."
Tap into the niche passion centers
Here's a sad fact about the internet if you're an advertiser: Your best audience might be impossible to locate. In fact, your prime audience might be so far under the radar that you don't know it exists.
The reason for this is simple. Online content is all about niche. The more specific the content gets, the better engaged and more passionate the audience tends to be. The trouble is that the audience size might be too small for any advertiser to notice because it doesn't rank on many of the traditional media measures. In those cases -- and there are a lot of those cases -- an ad network is often the only solution.
"Niche networks provide targeted access to audiences and even websites that we may have otherwise not been able to gain access to," says Corey Pilkington, account supervisor at Worktank. "For example, Worktank is currently using an ad network for an online campaign targeting website developers that allows us access to small, niche developer websites that don't even have a sales staff."
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