Eyeblaster Tries Total Ad Management

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Eyeblaster will soon join the ranks of firms offering support for both rich media and traditional ad serving and reporting.

An upcoming ad management offering, called AdVision, will attempt to unify all digital marketing for Eyeblaster clients. Specifically, the company's product -- scheduled for October release -- will support creation, placement, serving and reporting on ads in both rich and non-rich formats.

"Digital advertising is growing up and reaching out, so the AdVision platform will enable agency professionals to better serve their clients, from the development of the creative brief to reporting on results, with newly designed tools to plan, create, serve, measure, and optimize interactive campaigns," said Gal Trifon, Eyeblaster's President and CEO, in a statement.

Separately, Eyeblaster execs said support for ad placements in mobile and gaming environments should be ready by September. For now, the mobile piece does not exist and gaming capabilities are limited to interstitial placements on gaming Web sites, which is not substantively different from any other interactive ad insertion.

The AdVision platform is part of a gradual mainstreaming of rich media formats that has been underway for several years. Whereas at one time the purveyors of rich media units specialized in a single type of ad -- such as a rollover, video ad, floating ad or interstitial -- these companies have now become generalists, offering a wide range of rich ad types under one roof.

Likewise, several traditional ad management firms have already branched into rich media ad management. The platform comes several months after aQuantive's Atlas ad management unit introduced support for rich media campaigns, and two years after DoubleClick brought out its Motif product.

Yet Eyeblaster, the original floating ad company, is the first to come to general ad management from the point of view of the rich media specialist -- with the arguable exception of CheckM8, a rich media cum sell-side ad management player.

Eyeblaster executives have said the company is preparing several other initiatives for the coming months that will help it create additional revenue streams. Trifon said the offering is at least partly intended for advertisers that use rich media for the majority of their online campaigns, and that would like to consolidate their non-rich banner campaigns with the firm. Whether non-Eyeblaster clients will switch to AdVision from their current ad serving providers remains to be seen.