Online advertising is a long suffering industry. Plagued with low conversion rates, indeterminate ROI’s, a general negative public image. Not only do users seem to not fall for the ads, they actually make the conscious effort to visit websites with less advertising, and given the ease of browsing and proliferation of many vendors for one thing, it is not an altogether onerous task to accomplish. New tools like Readability from the arc90 team are available to render pages in simple 1.0 format that cuts out all ads and leaves only the article they want to read. OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan alleges that the current model is flawed to begin with and unsustainable. The mass of data collected by browsers, email providers, social media websites all has been applied to make fine-tune the types of messages that are being delivered to the user, all in the hope of getting that elusive click.

But there is a bright spot on the horizon for online marketers. Apart from the point that online advertising seems to have reached its bottom and will now rise up (according to Yahoo), there is a great push to make online ads more relevant and user specific. And now a new service has stepped up to achieve that. Bedrock.com – a start-up by the same people behind gumgum.com – makes use of the prosumer movement in an effort to make online ads more profitable. Their tagline is:

“Don’t spend time tweaking your creatives.
Allow incentivized publishers to work for you instead.”

Acting as an intermediary between the advertiser and the person or organization publishing the blog or magazine, Bedrock works with the publisher to create an ad that is not only relevant to the content and overall theme of the site, they also allow publishers to design and place the ads to ensure that the overall feel of the blog or magazine is not negatively impacted.

Then using a real-time auction platform for online advertising, Bedrock simply sells the key word to the highest bidder for a fixed period of time. After the period is over, the word is auctioned again and in this manner, a single ad can lead to different products.

The challenge for Bedrock is two fold:

1. Will brand managers actually use their service if they have no control over the visual aspect of the brand? Firms work hard to breed familiarity amongst users and often the image of a product is what draws the user to click on the ad.
2. Will enough publishers actually take the time to personalize the ads? The large publishing houses and companies already see such a small margin on their online offerings, that it is unlikely they would spend time on working to create page specific ads. They may prefer the regular advertising simply for the convenience of it all.