Feed Powered Advertising

November 19, 2006

Picture this: An ad unit that's easy to create, changes dynamically with RSS, and increases subscriptions to your RSS feeds...

We've been holding our tongues at Pheedo to chime in on our work on what folks are calling feed powered advertising. Initial iterations of this concept (by TechMeme and Federated Media for example) use blog posts as the content for advertising. It's a great idea, and it's just the start. At Pheedo, we've been developing a similar ad format. We've made it scalable by leveraging our existing technology. That means any advertiser with an RSS feed can use it. More importantly, it will be available to all publishers in our network very shortly. We launched a preliminary, basic version with PRWeb some time ago and have been working on further enhancements for some time as the interest in RSS from all corners heats up.

Here's a glimpse into the feed powered ad solution we've been testing over the past few weeks on a number of blogs and sites in the Pheedo network.

Why is this different? First off, let's look at the state of RSS advertising and divide it into two different types:

1. In-Feed Advertising
2. RSS Powered Advertising

Pheedo has been doing "in-feed" advertising for our clients for more than two years now, and while RSS adoption is growing, in-feed advertising is just the beginning of the overall RSS marketing story. The available in-feed inventory still only represents a small percentage of online inventory. But RSS content doesn't need to be limited to feeds - it can be used as a dynamic marketing message, which leads us to RSS feed powered advertising.

This is conversational advertising at its best, a topic that's been near and dear to me since we started Pheedo. It's about letting marketers use RSS content in a new way and 'move' that content to engage customers and attract new subscribers.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. We are currently testing our feed powered platform with several top brands and we'll keep you posted over the coming weeks and months. If you would like to take part in our beta testing, and promote your content and grow feed subscribers, contact us.

Posted by Bill Flitter on November 19, 2006 9:00 PM
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