Vibrant Media Buys In-Image Ad Firm

Contextual ad network Vibrant Media has acquired Image Space Media, an in-image ad technology company. The acquisition enhances Vibrant Media’s Vibrant Image, a product that identifies images within web content and embeds small overlays at the bottom of the image.

Vibrant says Vibrant Image is a premium placement that is more contextually engaging than standard display ads, helping combat banner blindness.

Vibrant CEO Cella Irvine joined the company in October 2011. The acquisition is part of her mission to expand the company’s contextual offerings with placements to deliver higher performance for brands and new revenue opportunities for publishers.

“Roughly 30% of our publishers’ content is images and they now play an important role in our strategy to deliver new media placements,” she said in a prepared statement.

Vibrant, best known for its in-text advertising formats, works with more than 6,500 publishers and advertisers including Vodafone, Chrysler and Unilever.

Of Vibrant Image, Jason Gole, digital media director of Universal McCann, said, “Vibrant Image ads enable Chrysler to engage users while they’re captivated by images, delivering a hyper-relevant and visually rich ad experience. We are very encouraged by the high level of performance we are seeing.”

ISM will become a Vibrant Media company, integrating with its existing VXPlatform to expand Vibrant Image through performance and targeting capabilities. VXPlatform audits page content including search data, source code data, demographic data, frequency of words and page positioning.