"Especially in light of the Dynamic Logic study that found that creative quality is 50 to 75 percent responsible for campaign success or failure, agencies must start evaluating the creative capabilities of networks," said Russ Fradin, president of Adify.

"As the industry looks for better ways to engage, not just reach, their audience, brands need to focus on compelling creative that builds an ongoing conversation with consumers and placing it where consumers spend time."

Other key findings from the survey include:

– More money is being allocated online each quarter:
   – 56 percent of respondents’ budgets were more than $500k in 2008.
     73 percent were over $500k in 2009.
   – In 2009, 37.9 percent of the respondents spend between $1-5 million
     per quarter on online advertising, 15.2 percent of respondents spend
     $5-20 million per quarter, and 5.9 percent spend more than $20 million
     per quarter on online advertising.

Branding is a major focus for online ad campaigns:
   – 83 percent of respondents allocate 50 percent or more of their budget
     to branding vs. direct response.

Awareness of vertical ad networks (VANs) continues to grow as a way to
   reach niche audiences:
   – 72 percent are familiar with VANs versus 56 percent in 2008.
 

Related Articles:

> Nielsen Shares Predictions for Advertising Trends in 2010

> Email Marketing Budgets Set For Increase In 2010

> Online Video Viewing Continues To Boom

NCC is jointly owned by three of the largest cable companies – Comcast Cable, Cox Communications, and Time Warner Cable. This makes up a good-sized chunk of television advertising in the US.

"Through Mixpo, national and regional TV advertisers can now run their existing TV ads in quality display inventory on cable operator ISP Web sites, and make them highly interactive on the Web," says Joe Grisafi, NCC’s vice president of digital media and advanced advertising strategies.

"Local advertising isn’t only about small and medium sized businesses.  It’s also about national and regional brands driving local response," says Anupam Gupta, president and CEO of Mixpo. "NCC has the largest Spot Cable advertising sales force in the U.S. and now also represents one of the largest locally targeted online ad networks. It just makes perfect sense to bring together this cross-platform advertising solution to their national and regional clients."    

The news of major cable providers taking their advertisers’ ads to the web shows that display ads are still a significant element in not just online advertising, but the big picture. AdWeek, citing data from Adify, says that the display ad market is stabilizing, at least in some categories, after being hit by the economy.

"Though it cannot claim comprehensive insight into pricing trends for the entire display marketplace — for example, it lacks data from many top publishers as well as the largest portals and search engines — Adify does have unique visibility into the online advertising ecosystem," says AdWeek’s Mike Shields of a report from Adify. "The Cox TMI-owned firm manages over 200 networks, representing inventory on 12,000 sites which reach nearly 70 million U.S. users."

Schwartz said Politico launched an ad network because,"We had a number of partnerships with major newspapers to feature our content but we knew that given the revenue issues that many newspapers face they could probably not afford to pay directly for that content. At the same time our advertisers wanted increased reach directly due to our wealthy, well educated male demographic."

 On selecting Adify to power the network Schwartz said," We conducted some research that showed that other politics sites and sections had the same demographic. We then contacted Adify as the leader in creating vertical networks as the mechanism to help monetize our content."
 

Initial members of the ad network include The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Denver Post, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and news aggregator Breitbart.com. The network also includes more than 30 other major news outlets and Schwartz says there are a number of new partnerships pending.

Schwartz says he does not think there is an over saturation of ad networks. "The number of web sites is over 150MM – and ad networks will continue to provide value as aggregators of quality content on specific subjects – such as politics."

He added," There will be networks that thrive and networks that stumble within each topical space, but we are sure that Politico has a unique and compelling offer to both publishers and advertisers."

The Politico Network will stand out according to Schwartz because, "Our demographics are better than finance or sports web sites when it comes to reaching wealthy, well educated men online."

Commenting on the current political climate Schwartz said,"This is going to be an amazing election season and either way interest in the new administration will be at an all time high."
 

Interesting development for Six Apart, we think. A week ago, they were dealing with Adify, one of a number of small blog ad services providers. Now when Chris Alden and company try to reach Adify’s Russ Fradin, they will be talking with Cox Enterprises’ latest acquisition.

“As Adify began raising our third round of financing to fund our expansion, Cox Enterprises expressed interest in acquiring us,” Fradin said on the Adify blog. “Although Adify was not seeking an acquirer, Cox

Many know Six Apart for its blogging tools like Movable Type, Typepad, and Vox, as well as the LiveJournal service it created and sold. Alden told us Six Apart is fully funded, giving them the groundwork to create an integrated ad platform for blogging.

Part of that groundwork merited a couple of moves. Six Apart will partner with Adify to handle the back-end accounting work on the platform. Fredin said their experience handling services for companies in media and technology looking to build communities of web properties has them ready to back this platform.

Control of the platform makes money in social media, as Alden noted. “It should be able to do the same with blogging,” he said.

Six Apart also made an acquisition to support their moves toward becoming this platform. Few outside the web development community may have heard of Apperceptive, a New York-based design house; their client list includes big names like the Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, and Cond