Engage to Debut New Ad Server

Embattled online ad player Engage is due to launch the new version of its AdManager

server at the end of next month, as the company faces continued financial and competitive pressure.

While fiscal issues — like the Andover, Mass.-based firm’s potential delisting from NASDAQ and a

pending buyout from parent CMGI — will continue to loom at least for the present,

Engage will address a number of competitive shortcomings with version 6.0 of the AdManager ASP.

For one thing, the service — which is branded AdBureau in its standalone, software variant — now

supports “surround sessions,” an advertising format that first debuted on New York Times Digital’s

NYTimes.com.

To date, only a few servers like 24/7 Real Media — which handles serving for NYTD

— have made serious inroads into serving surround sessions, though other players, such as industry leader

DoubleClick say that their systems can be configured to do the same, but add they have

yet to see a real demand from clients.

Nevertheless, the format, which Engage styles “eSessions,” has received praise from groups like the

Online Publishers Association, and research from Dynamic Logic has suggested that campaigns run in

NYT.com’s sessions resulted in a positive — and sizable — branding increases for clients AstraZeneca and

American Airlines.

Engage’s AdManager 6.0 also features a series of improvements designed to make trafficking rich media

ads easier — an enhancement that seeks to capitalize on traditional advertisers’ growing taste for audio,

video and animation embedded into online ads. So far, through its rich media certification program, the

company has approved Macromedia FlashMX for use in its server.

The rich media additions, which build in support for tracking interaction in Flash movies, also put the

server on par with other firms’ offerings. DoubleClick, for instance, added improved rich media support to

its own DART server last year.

These rich media features also incorporate support for future advertising formats, since AdManager — as

several competing offerings have for some time — also features an extensible architecture that can

incorporate as-yet-developed advertising types.

“We’ve had the ability since mid-1999 to work with streaming audio and video,” said Jordan Shultz,

Engage’s vice president of corporate business development. “What we’re doing now is trying to make it a

lot easier for folks who are trafficking the rich media to use it. We want to take the mystery out of rich

media — make it mainstream.”

Additionally, the server also integrates more closely with Engage’s ProfileServer, a customer data

mining and profile-building service that at one point had been sold as a separate, standalone offering.

Now, ProfileServer will be available as an add-on to AdManager/AdBureau, with new enhancements that can

incorporate data from marketers’ existing consumer databases.

The product also offers automatic optimization based on the number of clicks received by a campaign

creative; automatic browser, language and MIME type detection; and easier methods to regulate ad delivery,

so that multiple ads from the same campaign either appear or do not appear on the same page.

While the update will help Engage better meet growing market demand for emerging ad serving in areas

like surround sessions and rich media, spokespeople say the 6.0 release is primarily focused on simply

helping publishers boost CPMs while reducing ad serving expenses.

“The basic goal is to help publishers to create more valuable inventory to sell,” Shultz said. “The

auto-optimization capability is obviously one way of looking at that, while productizing the surround

session concept … is another. Our enhancements that we’ve made to our profiling capabilities will help

publishers to be able to understand their audiences and to target profiles in [new] areas … that’s a

great way to create more valuable inventory.”

“In terms of holding costs down … You can go to any number of Web sites and they’ll talk about rich

media advertising, and about the turnaround it will take to get that up and running. That’s an obvious

clue that it takes effort to test and work. Our enhancements … make it easier for traffic managers to be

more efficient at that.”

Engage spokespeople said future versions of the software will incorporate frequency capping by format,

bandwidth capping to limit the amount of ads with large file sizes sent per page, and more rich media

templates.

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to our newsletter.

Subscribe to Daily Tech Insider for top news, trends & analysis

News Around the Web