The recent focus for Internet advertising has been on direct response advertising, where direct marketers have leveraged the internet’s ability to track consumer behavior and infer purchase intent to deliver relevant one-to-one marketing. As example, the  paid ads next to search results. But there is more to Internet advertising than the CPC text ad…… What about brand advertising? Social networks (facebook, myspace to name some examples) and blogs have begun unlocking the interactive/social nature of the Internet, but taking full advantage of this interactivity and online communication remains a huge untapped opportunity for advertisers.

Although social networks have traditionally struggled to effectively monetize their inventory, the emergence of scalable, engaging brand advertising driven by consumer data could go a long way towards helping such large web companies make the most of their online audience. The advertising world is starting to realize this.

There is growing agreement among marketers that we are moving towards  three key principles that will shape the future of online advertising are:

1) Companies are beginning to realize that advertising is both a science (relevance) and an art (engagement)

2) Data is becoming more important than ever, and

3) The market will see an increasing level of co-opetition between advertisers, agencies, ad networks and publishers.

Internet Advertising lends itself to becoming a complex/simple math problem. With the right set of data, algorithms and targeting, it’s possible to create the most value possible by serving the right ad to the right person regardless of where they happen to be on the Web.

However, these ideas do not address the advertising intent which is another set of complexities. We would need to build in understandings of the advertisers goals and what audience segment they wanted to reach, and when they wanted to reach them. Another Blog enter down the track……