"As you start spending more money online you have to go to a lot of places to execute your online marketing," says Joe Tripodi, chief marketing officer for Allstate. "A lot of what we do right now is spend a little here and spend a little there, that can be difficult.
Those search-related ads now make up roughly 40% of the roughly $20 billion U.S. Internet ad pie. Internet-ad sales overall have nearly tripled in the past five years. They represent 7% of overall U.S. ads, up from 3% five years ago, according to eMarketer Inc.
Microsoft Corporation's $6 billion deal to buy an online-ad specialist called aQuantive Inc. puts into high gear a race between Madison Avenue and a new guard of technology businesses that are trying to dominate the unbridled market in brokering Internet advertisements.
The consolidation rush is also being driven by advertisers' desire to reach broad swaths of Internet users through a single ad buy. Despite the Web's promise to give advertisers a seamless way to place ads and measure the effectiveness of ads, buying online advertising can often be a bewilderingly complex task for marketers accustomed to buying time on a handful of TV channels.
Different Web publishers use different systems to run online ads, requiring Web marketers sometimes to manually track each piece of their ad buy independently. Marketers are looking for one dashboard that delivers information about their ad buy, automatically.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2007