Paramark Inc. believes it can single-handedly change banner ads' bad reputation with its soon-to-be-released AdPilot. The product, available Sept. 20, is designed to automatically optimize banner ad placements to increase a marketer's return on investment.
Its proprietary technology identifies successful banners and eliminates poor performers in real time. It actively tests new creatives, offers and messages as well as recognizes and responds to trends such as banner burnout when a once-successful banner is no longer effective.
AdPilot accomplishes this by automatically downloading data from ad servers such as DoubleClick and Engage. It then analyzes this data, makes recommendations and implements the changes directly into the ad server.
For hands-on marketers, the technology can be instructed to send an alert whenever a criterion is met. The AdPilot also can send daily status reports as well as be switched on or off at any time.
Early tests have seen banner ad response rates increase by 50 percent to 200 percent, said Mike Tuchen, chief operating officer and vice president of marketing at Paramark Inc., Sunnyvale, CA.
“It saves you a lot of time versus trying to manually figure out which ads are working on what sites,” he said. “It's for anyone that wants to dramatically increase the effectiveness of their ad campaign.”
One example of the technology's usefulness was a test it ran for a client. The test compared three images, three messages, two colors and two bits of animation.
“They found out color and image didn't matter — message mattered. A humorous message worked better than a $5 offer,” Tuchen said. “This drove their creative direction to really focus on the copy instead of the image. They saved the $5 and got higher effectiveness as a result.”
AdPilot can be installed in five minutes. Beyond Interactive and Lot21 are among the companies that have beta-tested the technology.
Paramark plans to release other Web-hosted services in the near future. The next product is called the Conversion Optimizer. This technology will optimize splash pages and special sections on the home page to improve conversion.
