How To Choose an Ad Network for Branding

October 25, 2010

A recent Advertising Age White Paper provided valuable advice to advertising agencies evaluating ad network partners for branding campaigns. A worthy read for any online marketer, we think the report provides particularly sound advice for selecting an ad network. Here are some of the questions Ad Age recommends you ask:

"How does the network secure its inventory?"

Collective has always provided advertisers with fully transparent inventory from the world’s leading publishing brands. 80% of our inventory is sourced directly from publishers. The rest via leading exchanges using our proprietary domain white list and screening technology for brand safety.

"Does the network guarantee the ads will run above the fold?"

Collective is the only network that measures view rate and time spend viewed on all ads for optimization and environment monitoring. Over 90% of our ads are above the fold and we can guarantee ATF placement if requested. And you can choose to exclude any inventory you don't want.

"Will the network guarantee that your ads won't run on undesirable sites? Does it use third-party verification tools?" 

Collective provides multiple layers of brand protection; first at the site level through our Certified Publisher List, then at the page level for content relevance, and then at the ad-level. Additionally, we have agreements with DoubleVerify, AdSafe, MediaTrust and Adometry. Because Collective runs on Doubleclick, we have the fewest billing discrepancies. Not to mention, DFA users can leverage pixel free targeting.

"Does the network worth with third-party data resources to enrich targeting?"

Collective pioneered the use of data for targeting and analytics. We have over 190 million active user profiles in our AMP® Audience Cloud™ – that’s more data than the two largest exchanges combined. All our data partners are NAI compliant and do not use PII.