AdReady-A Boost for Display Ads?

It’s only been a few days since I wrote about a study that predicts a rapid decline in display advertising on the web. It came from Borrell Associates, a specialist in local digital advertising. Then today the SmartBrief newsletter linked me to a WSJ Online Story on a start-up that allows advertisers to create and place their own display ads. Having found creating (and I use the word “create” loosely) display ads with considerable difficulty in the past, I was eager to check it out.

I went to the AdReady site and tried it and it didn’t work. So I followed my usual strategy. I watched the instructional video.

Actually, there were two issues. I had to create an account before I could play with their customization tool. That’s ok. But I couldn’t get the customization page to load. I switched to Firefox and it worked fine. That probably was a momentary blip; wouldn’t be the first time IE 2007 has caused problems.
So I used a template called AdDonna and customized an ad. I’m not pretending that it’s great copy; it was just a trial. But I liked their image better than my own, so I didn’t change that. I changed the background color to my signature purple, added the blog logo, and I had an ad! No charge up to this point. I wasn’t interested in spending any money, so I didn’t go on to the next step of deploying my ad. Looking at this screen, though, it appears to work much like choosing your target audience on Google using audience demos instead of keywords. I couldn’t find out anything about their ad network. A blog post from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer suggests that the company is being coy about that subject at present.
It’s hard for a small local or regional business to break into online display advertising. AdReady and counterparts AdItAll and AdBrite intend to change that. Based on what I saw today, they’ve got something going here!
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