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SAN FRANCISCO—Online advertising is hot, and the opening day of the AD:TECH 2004 conference here came on the heels of the latest report of the rise in online ad revenue.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers on Monday reported that Internet advertising in the first quarter of the year reached its highest level since the companies began their tracking in 1996. Revenues reached about $2.3 billion, up 38.9 percent compared with the same quarter a year earlier.
Such growth set the stage for the online ad agencies and tool vendors selling their wares and services at the show. AD:TECH organizers are expecting a total of 3,500 to 4,000 attendees at the show, of which 500 are exhibitors.
One new entry to online advertising is Dotomi Inc., a Boston-based company that unveiled at AD:TECH on Monday a new approach for delivering personalized ad messages to Web users.
Called Dotomi Direct Messaging, it allows marketers to send opt-in messages directly to a specific segment of consumers from within banner ad space, said John Federman, the companys president and CEO.
Federman likened the approach to e-mail marketing, but from within existing ad spaces on Dotomis network of Web publishers.
“With consumer fatigue toward e-mail, marketers are looking for new ways to do customer retention, cross-sell and up-sell opportunities on the Web,” Federman said.
Dotomis network of sites covers about 70 percent of the Web through hundreds of partners that include About Inc., NYTimes.com, Advertising.com Inc. and MaxOnline LLC, he said. The publishers decide which banner-ad space to open up to Dotomi Direct Messaging.
When a user who has opted in to receive marketing messages from Dotomis marketer customers visits a site in the network, Dotomi can deliver personalized message in place of a general banner ad, Federman said.
The services work through the use of cookies, with Dotomi gathering anonymous presence information when a user visits a site that is then associated by the marketer to customer information, said Yair Goldfinger, Dotomi founder and chief technology officer.
Dotomi Direct Messaging first went live in Israel in March 2003 with such marketing customers as Burger King and American Express Co. Federman said the service in Israel had click-through rates of between 7 percent and 12 percent. Dotomi Direct Messaging should be live in the United States later this month, he said.
In other news from the show, online marketing company Atlas DMT launched its Atlas Search tool that combines both its online ad management capabilities with the paid search management tools from its acquisition last year of Go Toast LLC.
Atlas Search integrates the media planning and analytics capabilities from the Atlas Digital Marketing Suite with Go Toasts management and reporting tools for search-engine marketing, said Karl Siebrecht, vice president of strategy and digital marketing suite.
Users can now manage and analyze campaigns in one place for all types of ads, such as banner ads, rich-media ads and search-based ads.
Atlas DMT, an operating unit of aQuantive Inc., also announced that it has renamed the Go Toast units to Atlas OnePoint.