With Aptimus, Apollo’s reach will only increase. They are already considered one of the biggest online advertising spenders and consistently rank in the top 10 marketers.

Brian Mueller, president of Apollo stated the plan is “achieving further process and cost efficiencies in new-student enrollments.”

While Aptimus will continue to serve it current big brand name clients in other industries, Apollo continues its relationship with various digital media affiliates and publishers including AOL and Advertising.com.

Amongst the other operations by the 30+ year old firm are the College for Financial Planning, the Institute for Professional Development, Insight Schools and Western International University.

It’s no mystery that ad networks are the hot-ticket item these days, ever since the Google acquisition of DoubleClick. As eyebrows continue to raise, so do questions. Does the continuing integration of ad networks, media and analytics firms with larger companies such as Microsoft, Google and WPP leave room for expansion and innovation or are they just being put into “little boxes”?

Aptimus specializes in point-of-action advertising, and the acquisition of High Voltage gives it a leg-up in the education market. Aptimus believes that High Voltage’s experience and relationships with educational institutions, combined with its existing network in the general media field, will make Aptimus one of the top educational lead providers.

“The acquisition of High Voltage Interactive launches Aptimus into a leadership position in our number one target category for lead generation,” said Aptimus CEO Rob Wrubel in a statement. “High Voltage’s total focus on the education category is a perfect match for our powerful and growing online advertising network that reaches a unique set of consumers by placing advertisements in active areas where most Web site publishers have not traditionally had advertising, including our new relationship with AOL.”

High Voltage has worked with educational institutions like the University of Phoenix, the Colorado Technical University Online, Kaplan University, and the ITT Technical Institute. It specializes in performance marketing, direct selling and lead conversion. As a result of the buy-out, Aptimus intends to introduce new services like school-specific hosted websites, lead follow up programs, and exclusive ad representations.

mSpoke, the Pittsburg start-up, whose technology has gone live since I explored their product back in March, is taking a slightly different approach to behavioral targeting by enticing consumers to rate the ads placed before them while they are rating online articles. But, in the end, the goal is of course to still increase online revenue for publishers.

But what about those other types of ad targeting? Are they still useful to the online advertiser? A report published in April by eMarketer, entitled “Online Ad Targeting: Engaging the Audience,” concludes that although online ad targeting is beneficial because it reaches an increasingly fragmented audience, reduces wasted impressions, and improves relevance for a campaign, the key disadvantage to targeting is it reduces reach.

But, the study explains that “if the ads are delivered to a high enough percentage of interested individuals, that same reduced reach can also greatly reduce wasted impressions and, thereby, cost.” The numbers somewhat support these pros and cons with the 29.7 percent growth in spending on behavior targeted online advertising in the U.S. in 2006, down from 42.7 percent in 2005 but predicted to rebound to 40 percent in 2008. Furthermore, the percentage of behaviorally-targeted online ad spending in the U.S. as a proportion of all online ad spending in 2008 is 9.6 percent, which is up from 7.7 percent in 2006.

Although the type of ad targeting that a marketer employs depends on the campaign, the study suggests that advertisers should utilize a mixture of targeting methods for best results. With 35.9% of senior marketing executives stating that 30% or more of their budgets are earmarked for targeting, it’s no wonder that 84% of U.S. advertising professionals cite the Internet’s more precise targeting of fragmented audiences as a prime benefit of online advertising.

Within each of the ten channels, advertisers will have access to demographic targeting that enables them to target by zip code, age, gender, income, or country. The ten Aptimus channels include: Active Downloaders, African-American, Communication, Early Adopters, Home/New Movers, Local Markets, Photo, Promotional, Self-improvement, and Social Networking.

Michael Mayor, Vice President of Business Development for Aptimus, tells ADOTAS, “Our placement really is in transactional areas of these sites. It is a truly point of action network [because] we can align an advertiser’s offer with the most engaged users on category leading sites that they trust.” Mayor also explained that the 10 channels are “tying together the light content publishers within the network that have all these different locations.”

These developments are based on Aptimus’ testing, which has found that users are most engaged anywhere a submit button lives on a page (ie. registration page, the end of a download, etc.). Mayor explains the benefits of Aptimus’ technology for advertisers because “they really can see who our audience make up is and target creative towards different groups to be more successful,” and for publishers, he says, “we are going to have more relevant and highly targeted ads going through their websites. [The] end result is going to be a high quality lead which generates a high payout to the publisher.”

Although search giants Google and MSN have already rolled out site demographic targeting technology, Aptimus’ abilities differ in that they can effectively target different audience segments such as Hispanic woman, ages 18-24, who visit a social site, and surf the Web at midnight. Lance Nelson, Vice President of Technology at Aptimus, tells ADOTAS that Aptimus corners the demographic targeting market because they understand that “…the holy grail is to find out who that individual is” behind web surfing in order to provide more detailed information for advertisers.

Aptimus’ new technology also allows advertisers to test different creatives by running different versions of the ad each targeted at a different demographic audience. Rob Wrubel, President of Aptimus, explains to ADOTAS that the new technology is a “powerful optimization and merchandizing engine” and “enables an advertiser to test multiple formats.”

Nelson also believes that Aptimus’ new Call Confirm technology harnesses cell phone ad capabilities because Aptimus “can verify interest and that becomes a very strong lead.” For advertising campaigns that incorporate Call Confirm, Aptimus calls consumers at the moment that they select a promotional offer to confirm the validity of the phone number the consumer has submitted and to verify consumer interest.

Wrubel sums up Aptimus’ enhancements as providing advertisers with a unique advantage because “…when [the] customer and advertiser meet, it is a high permission moment.”

Aptimus’ current clients include many of the top 500 direct marketers such as Procter & Gamble, Nokia, Dell, Gevalia, and Carnival Cruises.