Visual data is the next key tool to help networks and exchanges get improved return for their customer’s ad dollars. Here are some examples on how visual data can add value:

Visually understand your advertisers creative

Analyzing the visual components of an ad will automatically help you identify opportunities where it will engage your audience and avoid opportunities where it will blend into the ineffective background. What does the ad look like? What images, objects, colors, and contrasts does it contain? Do you have versions? Sizes?

Visually understand the content environment where an ad is being placed

Analyzing the visual content of target pages will automatically ensure the most effective ad placement and prevent the appearance of ads on pages with non-compliant content. What does page look like? What images, objects, colors, and contrasts does it contain? Is there a big photo in the middle? Is the background black, white, blue or green?

Know what your user base likes

Analyzing the visual data of ads and content pages automatically helps networks and exchanges understand what types of ads drive engagement. Do girls really like pink? Do boys really prefer blue? It is important to know what your users like, so you can give them what they want and grab their attention.

Contextual and behavioral data will always be very important pieces of the advertiser value chain but we need more data points to take targeting to the next level. The current data points don’t connect a user to a specific creative, campaign, or call to action, they just find the right places where there is an opportunity to connect. By adding visual data to the mix, we can to do a better job of maximizing those connection opportunities and increase audience engagement.

At this point, display advertising should work. It should work given the amount of contextual data and audience data available on the market today. The truth is, display advertising doesn’t work as well as it should because of an audience attention problem. Most sites are inconsistent and jumbled and we have to find a better way to place our ads in an environment that maximizes their ability to deliver campaign results.

“Our network is going to bring real order to the current state of chaos in online video advertising,” said CEO Jayant Kadambi in a statement. “YuMe will for the first time give advertisers the ability to place ads alongside contextually relevant content, ending current run of site buys that are neither effective nor transparent.”

Before an ad is placed, YuMe’s software scans the available video content and sorts it into ad-friendly categories like Auto, Finance or Entertainment. Advertisers then select which category matches their advertising message and their ad creative. YuMe in turn places that ad into the video, which can be downloaded or streamed in a variety of formats. The placement system gives a distinct advantage over non-targeted and run-of-site ads.

YuMe also claims its system is able to tell which videos are appropriate for different brands, making it a viable platform for monetizing user-created advertising, which can also be targeted according to category.

YuMe hosts both the video content and the advertising. The new system provides real-time reporting, and advertisers can customize their campaigns on-the-fly according to the numbers as they come in. The company has also included geographic and demographic targeting, allowing advertisers to customize ads for each particular audience.

In a press statement Mark Josephson, president of Seevast, Pulse 360′s parent company, said, “Each week, Pulse 360 expands with new publishers. Our network continues to grow and our advertisers continue to reach more customers.”

The agreement will allow Pulse 360 to distribute content-targeted sponsored link advertisements on a new website to be launched by Q-Phrase. Within the new website, students and academics will have access to research and analysis tools that can hold a large range of Web and local content.

The Q-Phrase website will also offer collaboration features so that teamwork on group projects and event organization is possible. Notes can be posted on the website by its users on community-specific virtual bulletin boards. Pulse 360 links will have a presence on the website with their links based on topic categories.

Content-targeted sponsored link advertisements on Bloggerland, a new social networking website, will also be distributed by Pulse.

Quigo’s newest partner, Forbes.com, one of the leading online business news and lifestyle media publishers, has just signed a multi-year deal that will place contextual ads powered by Quigo’s AdSonar platform on all Forbes.com websites.

The name of Quigo’s game is control and transparency. While advertisers using Google’s AdWords or Yahoo’s Overture have little say in how their ads are placed, Quigo encourages publishers to develop their own advertiser relationships and offers the ability to target ads by category, location, specific site, or even specific web page, all on an auction basis.

Quigo controls less than 10% of the contextual advertising market, but it has focused on signing up recognizable brands. Over the past few months, Quigo has signed deals with publishers like ESPN.com, the Cox Newspaper group, and FoxNews.com.

“The AdSonar platform, technology and approach will help Forbes.com optimize revenues across our business news and lifestyle pages while also enabling us to build a strategic asset in one of the most dynamic and fastest growing segments of the online advertising market,” said Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller in a statement.

With the agreements in place, Marchex will provide ad solutions to certain sections of the publishers’ websites, and to the websites’ targeted newsletters and blogs. Advertisers, in turn, will be able to place their product/service listings directly on premium and specific websites, and/or sections of pages within a website.

Marchex already has relationships with more than 100 vertically-focused online publishers, and the seven new publishers add to the brand-name roster. BusinessWeek Online, The Motley Fool, and the Ziff Davis’s online properties are only a few of the notable publishing brands Marchex currently deals with.

In a press statement, IndustryBrains CEO Eric Matlick said, “As the company that created the site-specific approach to contextual advertising more than five years ago, we are very pleased to build upon our leadership position by adding seven high quality online publishers to our platform since the beginning of the year. As 2007 progresses, we look forward to further increasing our market share while helping all of our new partners more fully realize the value of their online brands, and providing advertisers with direct access to many additional highly targeted audiences.”

As the profit margin for general interest (horizontal) ad networks gets smaller, I predict they will move to an Ad Exchange model that will play to their strength and expertise in remnant inventory. As 2006 proved to the industry, ad exchanges are no longer sketchy business models and can provide a significant value for publishers selling remnant or second or third-tier inventory.

But the ad exchange model presents general interest ad networks with a chicken and egg dilemma: how they can get the most number of publishers and advertisers to use their exchange (which one is more important the publisher or the advertiser) and how to create the best common ground for the two. It would come as no surprise to me if established traditional exchange giants such as eBay join the ad exchange game.

Online video will present contextual ad networks with the opportunity to move beyond textual content and take on the challenging task of understanding and monetizing video content. It will be a rat race with a big prize of becoming the “AdSense for Video.” Though Google is the prime candidate to win the race, it is by no means a trivial task with a set winner.

2006 saw the rise of a new breed of advertising network as vertical ad networks proved they can help brand marketers fill the large void left by general interest horizontal ad networks and present an attractive alternative to the brand-name web properties and large portal ad buys. In 2007 as the branding TV dollars continue the shift to online, vertical ad networks could capture the lion’s share of it by focusing on their core strengths of brand protection, brand engagement, transparency and helping brand marketers connect with their high composition audiences. The key for vertical ad networks in 2007 is to continue demonstrate to marketers that they attract highly targeted, affluent audiences as well if not better than the free standing brand-name sites and portals.

With the enormous pressure behind social networking sites to monetize their reach, behavioral ad networks have a great opportunity to prove their value proposition by segmenting these trendy target audiences into ad packages that both sales reps and media buyers can understand and feel safe with. The key battle will remain the same and that is who can cookie the most sites through strategic partnerships.

With the latest addition of Verizon Wireless to the mobile bandwagon, 2007 is shaping up to be a make or break year for a number of new and existing mobile ad network start ups. With the release of Windows Mobile and the continued adaptation by mainstream users, this will be the year when there will be sufficient mobile ad inventory for the medium to have a chance to prove its value. There will be lots of test mobile ad buys but whether they will translate into value for marketers will depend on how consumer’s react to ads on their mobile devices and if providers can deliver enough reach to become real competition to other proven ad media.

As online ad inventory continues to move from textual and web space to all forms of the digital medium, ad networks will continue to play an ever more significant role in our industry and as each newly established platforms go through their maturing process and new and better ways of monetizing them is discovered, we will continue to see both the evolution of ad networks as well as the birth of new ad networks that present real value for online marketers.

Still, as the aftershocks of the Google/YouTube union continue reverberating throughout the digital realm, changing company game left and right, other shifts are occurring just under the radar that have unleashed some of their own magnitude. One such notable overhaul is that of Kanoodle, the sponsored links pioneer that was restructured and refitted into a larger umbrella company now known as Seevast last year.

Under the Seevast tag lies a triumvirate of online-based entities that features not only the well-known Kanoodle brand, but domain rights management firm Moniker, and the newly formed Pulse 360. With this sea change, Kanoodle was remodeled as a PPC-based operation, with Pulse 360 carrying the sponsored links baton in the process.

While it might not have made the front page of the New York Times, the Seevast makeover does have some significant implications for the online marketing industry moving forward. Recently, ADOTAS chatted with Seevast CEO Lance Podell (pictured), an industry vet with 18 years behind him working in the trenches with innovators like Sprinks as well as the first incarnations of several interactive agencies.

Erudite and straightforward at the same time, Podell sheds light on his company’s big move, the hurdles to selling the new name, the well-traveled path that led him here, and how Seevast has positioned itself in the video-centric new year.

Hi Lance, so let’s first discuss your industry background.

I went to Lafayette College and when I graduated college, I went into the ad agency business. I grew up on blue-chip accounts primarily at Chiat Day. I had worked at agencies and I worked at publishing firms, so I had worked at Chiat Day and worked at Conde Nast, skipping a few things. But then I went back to Harvard Business School after about four years out of college. In school, I made the decision that I really wanted to get into marketing consulting and looking at products outside-of-the-box.

It was interesting timing, it was 1990 when I went back to school. In ’92, loyalty marketing programs were hot and I ended up going to Digitas out of college, which wasn’t Digitas then, it was Bronner Slosberg Humphrey. I ended up going there to trot out other businesses that their clients might create. So, I worked with Disney on figuring out if they built the Disney Institute, would people come. I worked on Quaker products building their first loyalty programs, worked on the precursor to AT&T’s “True Rewards.”

Then, I moved back to New York and went to work for Ogilvy in their first interactive marketing group, the first iteration of that out of the direct group back then. [We] put American Express “Express Net” up on AOL, which was American Express’s first venture online, and back then there wasn’t the Web. That meant it was the first place you could transact online. We also built the first microsites online, so we got Fodor’s and Frommer’s to contribute content to the Express Net site on AOL.

Then, as you probably recall, content was king. I went back to the publishing side of the house, and I went to Time, Inc., where I worked on all of the opportunities for the Time, Inc. online properties. That was really fun until distribution became king, and then I went to US West and worked on interactive television. So, I guess the theme here is I had spent the majority of my career on the advertising and publishing sides of the house, which is a good entrée to where I am now. I built PCH.com for Publisher’s Clearinghouse, and then went to Shopping.com when it was DealTime as the chief marketing officer.

At that point, I had connected the dots between all things advertising and all things publishing, meaning the first time I was in a real referral-based business—where you were leading consumers via the advertiser to the published page—from there I ended up at Sprinks. Again, for about the last 7 or 8 years, I’ve been working on referral-based ad business. So I’ve had a long history at advertising, agencies, publishing firms, and with that, came the logical conclusion that I should be running an ad network that was based on the advertisers and publishers.

As a content-targeted sponsored link network, Pulse 360 has added more than 10,000 publishers to its network in 2006, with MSN and the Dow Jones Online Network representing a few of the 2006 additions.

In a statement, Seevast CEO Lance Podell affirmed, “we have added more than 10,000 publishers to our network in 2006, including some of the Web’s best like The Wall Street Journal and other sites of the Dow Jones Online Network”. Other partnerships that Pulse 360 continues to build on include USATODAY.com, more than 30 sites of the CBS Television Stations Group, more than 75 CBS Radio sites, NASCAR.com, Autobytel.com, and more.

General Partner of TheOnlineInvestor.com Ted Allrich added that “our relationship with Pulse 360 will help us ensure our customers are being served highly relevant ads that are optimized based on our key demographics. Pulse 360′s listings are optimized across context, behavior, local and demographic targeting, which makes the most sense for our site.”

Marchex-powered contextual ads will begin appearing on CurtCo and IToolbox websites “immediately,” according to IndustryBrains, with additional targeting to IToolbox blogs, communities and other web sites. Like almost every ad network, the Marchex system can target individual sections or pages.

“We chose Marchex because of its successful track record in the IT marketplace,” said IToolbox president George Krautzel in a statement. IndustryBrains has partnerships with more than 100 vertical brand publishers including Gannett’s USATODAY.com and Ziff Davis online properties. “Marchex’s solutions are flexible and scalable enough to easily deploy to the varied components of the ITtoolbox community, whether our blogs, groups, or targeted knowledge bases.”

As a whole, Marchex serves ads on more than 200,000 websites, and launched its own ad network in November. Earlier this year, IndustryBrains advertising was integrated into Open List, a search and user-generated content platform, also owned by Marchex.

“The consumer audience is watching videos online,” said Seevast CEO Lance Podell in a statement. “Advertisers can now reach their audience in this highly desirable space, and publishers can add another way to monetize their content in a way that’s non-invasive to viewers.” Research firm eMarketer says that the online video ad market could be worth $3 billion by 2010.

Just like Pulse’s text link ads, the video ads can be targeted by context, website localization, user location, user behavior or demographic.

Pulse 360 was previously part of the Kanoodle pay-per-click search advertising network, another company currently under the Seevast brand. Pulse’s current clients include Fox.com, MSN, MSNBC, and the Wall Street Journal Online.