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Will Format Dynamics Start a Display Ad Revolution?

Written on
May 7th 2008
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by Kathleen  |
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breakingnews.jpgADOTAS – Has a new age of interactive advertising dawned? OK, that may be a tad dramatic, but the folks at Format Dynamics have found a way to tap into a completely new market for display advertisements – and it will probably shake up the increasingly stagnant just-waiting-for-a-big-innovation display market.

So what’s the deal? Format Dynamics has developed a way to insert ads (that are actually readable! And new!) into Web page printouts with its Clean Print program. Market research firm MetaFacts estimates that readers printed more than 61 billion pages last year – and until now, that represented completely untapped ad inventory, Holien explains.

“As it stands, even with the printer-friendly format, you get a horrible, cluttered user experience when you print a page – and elements often get cut off,” Ethan Holien, Format Dynamics’ CEO told ADOTAS. “With our program, you get a magazine-like experience. Your printout includes advertisements that are appropriate for the printed page.”

But never mind the user: publishers and advertisers may be the biggest winners with the new development. The program essentially creates a new ad channel with reformatting technologies that paginate HTML content, adding an entirely new level of ad inventory for the publisher. Not only is a fresh ad (never the same as the one that appears on the users’ computer screen) printed out with the content, publishers and advertisers can position ads in different ways – on the lower-right-hand corner of the page, for example.

Clean Print will provide the most significant impact for travel publishers, news sites and sites that post highly print-worthy items like recipes, directions and tickets, Holien predicts.

“The ads are digitally served and targeted for each user, resolving a number of problems for publishers and advertisers,” Holien noted. “For years, major publishers and have been trying to optimize the blend of content and ads and really monetize ad space, without sacrificing the user experience. Printer-friendly buttons attempted to address the issue somewhat, but ads were still being cut off.”

While developing the Clean Print program (the idea was hatched about four years ago), Holien and his team realized that there were no reliable analytics available to screen printing behavior. Click-monitoring is down to a science, but publishers can only gather printing stats through their print-friendly buttons.

So Format Dynamics created Print Tracker – a browser and link-based program that measures everything users print (side note: interestingly, most people don’t use the print-friendly button to print content, Holien said.)

The company has also developed a Click for Print program. While it’s an ancillary development for Format Dynamics, “it’s a way to print banner ads and other display ads – and it’s great for coupons,” Holien explained.

Clean Print is currently live on several dozen newspapers, Rand McNally – and ADOTAS!



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