Quigo Gains Leverage with Contextual Ads
Online business is reaching astronomical levels. The potential for selling services and products is everything a business can hope for. In the midst of this ‘buying soiree’ are the search engines playing their part by hosting online advertising. Two of the big hosts have been- you guessed it- Google and Yahoo, showcasing and sponsoring ads on their engines’ pages. The high-class engines are running their black-tie affair like a couple of aristocrats with a stronghold on the enterprise.
Advertisers have little control as to where their contextual ads (the sponsored links that run alongside related articles online) are engaged within Google’s multitude of pages. Advertisers buy keywords pertinent to the vast number of pages on the search engine. The problem is that their advertisements can either be linked to a ‘premier’ site or it can run adjacent to a ‘nobody.’ With contextual ads accounting for $2 billion in revenue last year or 13 percent of online spending (eMarketer), advertisers are a bit wary in relation to placement.
Along comes Quigo Technologies, a New York-based ad service in its rented tuxedo to charm the pants off of some of the high-end advertisers in this affair dominated by Google (eMarketer calculated that 60 percent of contextual ad spending went to Google last year). Quigo has been a bit more debonair and noble to advertisers, giving advertisers lists of specific sites where their ads appear and opportunity to buy exclusively on those sites and particular pages of the site.
Advertisers pay Google and Yahoo for contextual ad placement on a wide array of pages, but advertisers are hardly privy to what sites contain their advertisements and what the content is like on those pages. Advertising representatives from both Yahoo and Google have been playing calm, cool, and collected, saying that the difference in Quigo’s style is not substantial and inconsequential. If this is true, why has Google made plans to engineer their contextual ad placements to be comparable to the way in which Quigo conducts their ads?
A salient point Quigo makes while pouring sugar into publisher’s ears is that they allow the publishers to be in control of the relationship with the advertisers. “We are gaining a lot of share,” said Michael Yavonditte, the chief executive of Quigo. “This has become a multibillion-dollar industry with no clear second-place company. There’s a lot of opportunity for other companies to put their own stamp on it.”
Google and Yahoo operate the process as the middle man between the publishers and the advertisers. This offers no chance of building rapport between the publisher and advertiser, but Quigo allows this relationship to be fostered. “Google, Yahoo and most other blind networks sit in the middle and own the advertiser relationships,” said Henry Vogel, the chief revenue officer of Quigo. “By outsourcing their performance marketing programs to them, publishers get a check but little else. They don’t really build any longer-lasting strategic assets.”
In the next few months, as reported by Kim Malone who is director of online sales and operations for Google AdSense, Google is prepared to make changes that will mimic Quigo’s process. Advertisers on Google networks will be able to make bids for their contextual ads to be placed on specific sites.
Hey Google, David –err- Quigo has another rock to load into their slingshot: Quigo allows advertisers to sell their own contextual ads and run them under their own brand names. Anyone who has been on Google and been faced with the “Ads by Google” header will be able to tell the difference. More important than the label, media companies can sell their advertisers Quigo contextual ads; this differs from Google whom handles all of the sales for its publishers. Media companies will have a say in their relations with the advertiser.
Quigo has enchanted some big names such as ESPN.com, FoxNews.com, and Forbes.com. These companies appreciate the knowledge of knowing how their advertising money is being used and being able to establish ongoing relationships with the advertisers. The giants may level the playing field by tailoring their style to fit like Quigo’s. This may be just a battle won by the little guy amongst a war dominated by the giants, but nevertheless, the tale will be remembered.
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