Ad Networks - Finding Advertising Gold With Niche Sites

Jim Meskauskas of Underscore Marketing asked about The Role of the Network Buy:
Buying big sites like Yahoo!, AOL and her subsidiaries, and other tier-one branded media properties is the right thing to do, but it is not the only thing to do. People working in this industry appear to understand more than most people in marketing that we are highly fragmented, multi-media consumers. We talk often about the role the Internet can play in this embarrassment of niches. Yet by and large, agencies and their clients buy the same big sites with numbing repetition. (Full article on MediaPost)


My reply:
I agree that ad networks provide the perfect opportunity for advertisers to utilize niche sites in order to fill out their media plans. Ad networks are (or can be) the goldminers of advertising by having in-depth knowledge of the channels and publisher sites they represent.

However, just as with any over-mined territory, effectively and efficiently finding gold on the WWW is requiring more knowledge of the territories - which is why vertical ad networks such as ThomasB2B and Quigo are growing in popularity.

ThomasB2B
http://thomasb2b.com/

Quigo Technologies
http://www.quigotechnologies.com/