Friday night, Jason Calacanis challenged Vibrant Media CEO Doug Stevenson to a debate at the AD:TECH event a little over a week from today in New York City.
Vibrant Media, you might remember, is the maker of IntelliTXT technology. This product adds “contextual” advertising links into webpage content, with “double underlines” to differ the advertisement hyperlinks from usual ones. The company believes that this method is helpful, and are standing behind their clickthrough rate, which seems higher than other ads in the contextual arena. However, they do not address the fact that these “advertisements” aren’t necessarily helpful at all for the people reading the articles. Links were put in the text in order to give people background or further information about the topic they are reading - not to have someone looking at some information about earthworms and see an advertisement on the word “worm” that takes you to a software security firm.
1 response so far ↓
1 CT // Oct 30, 2004 at 7:58 pm
I thought this technology was going to be included in an upcoming flavor of Windows and/or IE — Microsoft was going to use purple underlines for it — but it was abandoned. If it’s not going to come integrated in the OS or browser, it’s never going to take off.
It is a hamhanded method of inserting advertising, and for me, crosses the line between content and commerce. The lack of relevance (earthworm vs. Net worm as a good example) makes it worse, and in fact prevents it from really being seen as useful to even advertisers.