AdRelevance to Issue Alerts about Competitor's Ads

In an effort to bring its customers competitive intelligence more quickly, AdRelevance on Tuesday launched an email service that sends users information about competitors’ advertising campaigns.

For Web publishers, the service lets them monitor advertising campaigns debuting on competitor’s sites, so they can approach the advertiser themselves. For advertisers and agencies, AdAlert allows them to see where competitors are advertising so they can respond.

The company, at least in part, is responding to the marketing efforts of competitor Leading Web Advertisers, which boasts that it can provide its clients this type of information within 24 hours of when an ad first appears.

Users of the AdAlert service specify what kind of information they’re looking for, and, when AdRelevance does its weekly update and discovers that the event occurred, an email is sent to the subscriber. That message lets the user know what event has occurred and links to a Web site that has all of the details.

“In both the offline and online worlds, companies looking to keep tabs on the competition have traditionally relied on slow, cumbersome methods for tracking ad activity,” said Marty Levin, executive vice president of sales and marketing for the AdRelevance division of Media Metrix (MMXI).

“The new AdRelevance AdAlert service fulfills the true promise of the Internet by providing automatic, customized intelligence data at a level of detail, accuracy and relevance.”

AdRelevance says it’s also developing technology to send the AdAlert emails to wireless devices like cellphones and PDAs.

The service will be offered to existing AdRelevance clients for a small extra fee.