Tumri to Put Ad Selection Power in Long Tail Publishers' Hands

A new advertising and “merchandising” network, Tumri, is attempting to put the power to pick what ads run on their content partners’ Web sites in the hands of the content partners themselves and, the company says, thereby let them better target the audience they know best.

Media partners can use the Tumri Publisher system to customize which ads and marketers are allowed to appear on their Web sites. Its proprietary unit, called AdPod, offers unique levels of interactivity, while blending branding and merchandising functions, according to Sundar Krishnamurthy, senior director of product marketing for Tumri.

“The important thing is that the AdPod… is interactive, and it presents multiple products in a single ad unit. Whatever space the Web site publisher sets out for a set of products, the ad unit can present multiple products from… criteria that the publisher sets,” Krishnamurthy said.

The Tumri Publisher system is primarily intended for long tail publishers with niche audiences that may respond negatively to mistargeted ads, or that may otherwise benefit by controlling ad content manually, according to Hari Menon, CEO of Tumri.

“If you are a blogger writing about high end fashion, you don’t want ads for apparel from WalMart showing up there,” Menon said. “[Publishers] are the ones used to looking at the revenues they made on their site and what ads work on their site quickly.”

One specialty publisher that has tried out the system, Gary Laney, president of online fashion magazine SheSheMe, which targets the 20- to 40-year-old professional woman’s demographic, has already found the Tumri system to improve targeting over Google AdSense.

“With AdSense you can tell them you want things to do with women, but you don’t know what’s going to come up. We tried it and it was not the kind of quality that we were looking for, as it had a mixture of too many ads,” said Laney.

Laney said that it was possible to define which ads were shown with other ad networks he’s worked with, but it was too time consuming, and he prefers the Tumri Publisher system for allowing him to set parameters.

“We had to get every single thing we wanted to work with approved, and that took a lot of time, but this is a lot easier,” he said. “We can select who the advertisers are… products and price range, and that’s really what’s interesting to us.”

Laney added that his targeted demographic particularly dislikes being shown ads for what they consider inappropriate content, so targeted ads are not only better for business, but mean less disgruntled messages from readers.

“We get complaints. If we go outside our profile they let us know,” he said.