The completely opt-in platform encourages consumers to sign up for ads through websites, social media and mobile apps as well as blogs; as you might have guessed, advertisers pay only when the leads come in. The upgraded AdLeads platform allows users to create ad categories based criteria ranging from type of site to time of day or year.

These groups can each be assigned different creative — 40-character headlines, 120 X 60 image and body text of 120 characters — which can be edited and updated on existing placements in near real-time. Advertisers can then use data from Pontiflex’s opt-in advertising to offer promotions or better engage targeted consumers.

In addition to a keynote speech by JP Morgan Analyst Imran Kahn, who detailed his predictions for 2010, particularly for display and social media, Pontiflex hosted a panel with marketing representatives from BabyCenter, The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), Tommy Hilfiger and Ferrara & Co., which represents Heinz. These four companies shared their impressive experiences using CPL in Pontiflex’s white paper.

In particular, a campaign with ASPCA produced email open rates for Pontiflex-generated leads were more than twice that of organically garnered signups and a third higher than other lead-generation channels. The click-through rate was close to 6%, also more than twice that of organic leads.

Some of the key benefits of CPL, the panelists noted, included transparency in the source of the leads, the opportunity to immediately follow up with acquired leads and transforming impressions into actual people.

It was an impressive year of growth for Pontiflex, which Krishnan partially credited to the explosion of social media, that validated CPL as a complementary channel to search and a way to build ROI while focusing on brand campaigns. I caught up with Krishnan and chatted about Pontiflex’s success as well as the advantages of CPL as a channel.

And here is an excerpt on the display channel from Khan’s keynote speech.

Pontiflex found that 48% of leads were used to push social media and community sites in the fourth quarter, an increase from 43% in the third. E-newsletters also saw a greater percentage of leads, rising to 26% in the fourth quarter from 23% in the third.

Free trials and subscriber acquisition both lost share in the fourth quarter, with 11% of leads going to the former (compared to 14% the previous quarter) and 6% headed to the latter (a 9 point drop from 15% in the third).

The overall cost of basic marketing leads increased by 31%, which Pontiflex attributed to an increased number of publishers with CPL offerings. Average CPL in premium fields dropped quarter over quarter, from $3.36 to in the third to $2.72 in the fourth. CPL actually increased between third and fourth quarter for basic fields, from $0.62 to $0.81.

The highest CPL in premium could be found in the entertainment vertical at $3.00, followed by health leads at $2.70. The lowest CPL was in market research at $0.52.

Leave alone advertisements for the powerful BMW M3, even the environmentally friendly BMW Mini Cooper (44.2 mpg) takes great pains to proclaim its speed (0-60 in 8.5 seconds) for fear of losing out in this performance driven age. The spirit of the Olympics is no longer a torch that we light every four years – the quest for better performance is an aspiration that we lug around in our backpacks all the time.

Why should it be different in the world of online advertising? Why can’t our executive teams and clients expect better performance from our branding campaigns? Why should branding campaigns be insulated from the demand for better performance and higher ROI?

Luckily for online marketers, the Internet has recast the relationship between branding and ROI campaigns. No longer are they at odds with each other. With the emergence of performance advertising and engagement marketing, they can converge at a junction of symbiosis. Brand marketers can enhance important metrics like awareness, recall and recognition and be able to achieve ROI at the same time.

For this to occur, there needs to a fundamental shift in online marketing strategies. Brand marketers need to ring out the old and ring in the new. No longer can branding campaigns rely on the traditional “broadcasting” approach, where the advertiser message is sent out to an audience – be it through TV, radio, or an online banner.

Instead, branding needs to take on a more active approach, where brand marketers connect with interested consumers cost-effectively and engage them in relevant ways. This calls for a three phased approach:

Acquire consumers cost-effectively: Advertisers can grow their in-house databases by using advertising purchased through CPM, CPC and CPL pricing models.

The industry is already moving away from CPM advertising. The most recent IAB PWC advertising report showed that performance advertising accounted for as much as 57% of the overall online advertising spend. This is consistent with the overall evolution of online advertising, which can be narrated as a tale of a quest for higher ROI.

Just like in the last recession saw the growth of CPC advertising at the expense of CPM advertising, the current downturn is seeing the emergence of CPL advertising. Advertisers from a diverse spectrum of industry sectors like Kimberly Clark, UNICEF, Gold’s Gym and Coldwater Creek are using transparent CPL advertising to acquire consumers that are interested in their brand.

“The industry is moving towards CPL advertising,” says Daniel Taylor, senior analyst in Yankee Group’s Consumer Research group. “CPC pricing models are placeholders for CPL advertising,” he says. “Advertisers only want to pay for very specific consumer interactions, and not for wasted clicks or impressions.”

Engage by email: After acquiring qualified consumers in a cost-effective way, the next step is to engage consumers by email to keep the conversation going.

Through email, advertisers can communicate with consumers relevantly. This in turn makes a positive impact on branding metrics. What’s more, email is also good for ROI. Noted direct marketing expert Stan Rapp estimated that the average lifetime value of an email address to a marketer is as much as $118. Re-affirming this estimate, in a recent study released by Datran Media, 80.4% of executives said that email marketing (to an in-house list) was the best performing vehicle in terms of delivering the highest ROI.

Brand in meaningful and relevant ways: The last step is to drive people to relevant destinations. The 2008 Obama Presidential campaign directed users to a variety of information rich assets: Podcasts, Youtube videos, donation pages mobile websites and many others. Other successful engagement vehicles include the Dell Ideastorm community site, the JetBlue Twitter forum or the Kimberly-Clark pregnancy countdown widget.

Through these forums, the advertiser stays in control of the branding message. What’s more they enable more relevant communications between the advertiser and consumer – which helps drive branding metrics like awareness, recognition and recall.

In the age of performance, branding campaigns have just joined the party. By deriving ROI from their branding campaigns, advertisers will clearly be able to demonstrate to their executive teams how marketing moves the business needle.

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Users will pay only for qualified leads — not for clicks and impressions that might never convert — and increase returns on marketing dollar, Pontiflex said.

Marketers and agencies can log on to the Pontiflex AdLeads Web interface to automate every step of online advertising. They can:
– Find publishers based on campaign goals
– Set up transparent CPL campaigns in less than 15 minutes
– Create display creative and run it on a CPL pricing model
– Traffic creative to publishers and approve tests
– Optimize campaigns in real-time
– Pay only for leads from interested consumers

“By being able to pay only for qualified leads and not for clicks or impressions, a cost-per-lead pricing model makes complete sense for advertisers,” said Kurt Homfelt, president and CEO of Dunhill Vacations, a growing Web site in the travel category. “Transparency is critical. Leads from Pontiflex have vastly outperformed any CPM and CPC campaigns that we have tested.”

“CPL advertising was always more cost-effective than online banner and search advertising,” said Zephrin Lasker, CEO & co-founder Pontiflex. “But banner and search campaigns offered marketers and agencies the advantage of being able to centralize campaign management, which is great, especially for marketers with limited resources. With today’s announcement marketers and agencies can run cost-effective CPL campaigns as easily as they would a search campaign.”

Pontiflex was founded in February. It raised $2.5 million in Series A funding in April from leading venture capital funds New Atlantic Ventures and Greenhill SAVP.

But all is not gloom and doom. Many Fortune 500 and SMB marketers are maintaining, even increasing their advertising budgets by implementing new economic measures for new economic times.

What’s at the heart of the new strategy for these brand marketers?

In one word, “Engagement.”

No longer do brand marketers have the luxury of deploying “big bang” campaigns with heavy TV and print schedules to boost awareness, favorability and other branding metrics.

For one, by themselves, these methods are not cost-effective. In addition,  they are not in tune with the times.

It might be sound clichéd, but the Internet has democratized our society. Every industry segment has been profoundly affected by the ability for people to express their personalities through their likes, dislikes and preferences.

You can’t escape it. I saw an excellent documentary Helvetica, in which  an eminent design critic Rick Poyner points to the proliferation of social-networking websites as examples of where people “are using graphic design to express their individuality,” and how this will drive changes in the way new fonts will come into being.

If obscure industries like typesetting  can see and react to the winds of change, then surely online marketers driving this change can reinvent ourselves in keeping with the times.  We need to move from an “announcement” focused strategy to one that enables us to talk to our consumers at multiple touchpoints in a way that is relevant and meaningful to them. 

This shift is already taking place. A large number of companies like Nike are moving dollars away from traditional media. Instead, they are building vehicles like community sites and newsletters (such as  nikeplus.com) that allow them to engage their consumers in a genuine two way conversation. The Starbucks Idea site and the Mercedes community forums are just a few more examples of marketers gaining real-time feedback from their consumers to drive meaningful change to their brands.

In an article in the New York Times, called “The New Advertising Outlet: Your Life”, Trevor Edwards, Nike’s corporate vice president for global brand and category management says of the Nike Plus Community Site “It’s a very different way to connect with consumers,” says. “People are coming into it on average three times a week. So we’re not having to go to them.”

Nike is not alone.

According to Advertising Age and TNS Media Intelligence, the top 25 companies with the largest advertising spend over the last five years cut their spending last year in traditional media by about $767 million.

Given that newsletters, community sites and the like offer brand marketers the opportunity to engage consumers in a meaningful way, the challenge is to build a pipeline of qualified members for these vehicles cost-effectively.

Many of our clients are using transparent CPL advertising for this purpose. With falling click-through rates and increasing keyword costs, CPM and CPC pricing models are not cost-effective for building a large pipeline of qualified leads. Transparent CPL advertising enables brand marketers to map leads to their sources and build and segment a pipeline of qualified consumers quickly.

There is yet another advantage to be gained by moving away from traditional media.

To gauge the success of their programs, brand marketers can now measure the effectiveness of their engagement vehicles in terms of metrics like newsletter open rates, bounce rates, click-through rates and sales. They can tie in their marketing metrics to business results more directly, i.e. they can operate more like direct marketers. Which is a good thing. A result focused mindset helps them drive and prove ROI in tough economic times.

Sure, the tough economic times have taken a bite out of traditional media budgets. But it was about time. As an industry, we can utilize these tough economic times to set practices in place that truly harness the power of the Internet to engage consumers in a relevant way and deliver real value to our clients.

Interactive advertisers can create the custom banners themselves and then deploy them on specific publisher sites in Pontiflex’s GENList publisher directory. Its patent-pending data transfer technology then delivers the lead data from publisher to advertiser.

“In this economy, we are always looking for ways we can get more bang for our buck,” says Jared Blank, CEO of Tripmela, an industry leading travel Web site focused on India. “We run a large number of online campaigns to generate qualified leads and build our newsletter in a cost-effective way. AdUnit X banners are by far the best performing of all our creative units.”

Pontiflex’s ad management platform already allowed advertisers to automate and centralize media planning, campaigns, reporting and optimization. “Now they can also create custom CPL AdUnitX banners, which have a demonstrable track record of increasing campaign ROI,” said Zephrin Lasker, CEO and Co-founder, Pontiflex. “Advertisers can now buy display advertising on a CPL basis and not just through CPM and CPC pricing models.”

In April, Pontiflex raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from venture capital firms New Atlantic Ventures and Greenhill SAVP.

Zephrin Lasker, Founder and CEO of Pontiflex stated “With returns on display advertising falling and search keywords becoming increasingly more expensive, GENList 2.0 provides marketers with an effective way to increase advertising ROI.”

CPL advertising allows advertisers to pay only for qualified leads generated from their ads which dramatically increase their potential ROI compared to other methods such as CPC or CPM.

This solution comes in light of the rapid growth of the online lead-generation industry year-to-year (71% according to IDC). Using Pontiflex GENList 2.0, advertisers have the capability to evaluate publishers and optimize campaigns on the basis of quantitative criteria such as CPL, lead volume, and fields collected.

Lasker continued “For years, broadcast, print and banner marketers have always had easy access to qualitative and quantitative campaign data. Now, marketers have the same level of detail for consumer online lead generation. GenList 2.0 tears down traditional barriers between online marketers and publishers in the lead generation industry. It’s an ideal solution for advertisers looking to generate qualified leads for their newsletters, direct marketing campaigns, member loyalty programs and brand-specific sales efforts.”

The funds will be used to build the company’s sales and marketing efforts and support its suite of offerings in a push to simplify lead generation. The company cites stats that say the online lead generation biz is growing 71% annually – the fastest-growing segment of online advertising.

The stupendous growth is likely attributable to the increased push for interactive advertisers to deliver measurable results; CPL advertising allows companies like Pontiflex to pay solely for customer lead data, instead of just clicks or page views.

Brian Hirsch, managing director of Greenhill and Scott Johnson, managing partner of New Atlantic Ventures will join Pontiflex’s Board of Directors as part of the deal.