Billboards offer companies and businesses the opportunity to reach local audiences by strategically placing advertisements and images on large billboards near roadways.
In most contexts, an advertising network is a company that combines the companies’ advertisements with different advertising venues, including websites, magazines, and television commercials. Ad networks are so named because they manage networks of ad placement opportunities. They are usually not independent networks.
Ad networks have long been the foundation of the advertising industry. While advertising agencies are usually responsible for creating ad campaigns and creating graphics and slogans, networks are in charge of placing these ads in a way that grabs the attention of consumers. Much of the science behind ad network success involves studying consumer trends to develop effective ad placement strategies.
At the same time, print media was the main canvas of the advertising network. Most network advertising today happens online. While the context may have changed, many of the core strategies have remained constant.
An online advertising network is a company that acts as a link between companies that want to advertise online and websites that want to sell advertising space.
There are three main types of ad network. First is the vertical network, that is, a clearly delineated list of advertising placements and website placements. Ad networks that use vertical networks can usually identify where each ad is placed.
Blind networks work the other way around. Advertisers will pay networks a set fee for placing ads in a certain number of posts, on a certain number of sites, or for a certain number of days. However, the specifications of where the ads will be placed are generally not disclosed and are often left to the discretion of the network.
For advertisers who know the audience they want to reach, targeted marketing may be a better and more profitable path. Targeted marketing focuses on targeting ads at a discrete type of consumer. In print, this often takes the form of advertisements placed in trade magazines or on billboards in certain types of stores. It tends to take on a slightly more nuanced meaning in the internet space.
Advertising network operators often coordinate targeted advertising online by tracking Internet traffic and serving ads to certain web users based on their browsing history. Tracking can be behavioral, ie triggered by an individual’s click history or buying tendencies, or contextual. Contextual ad serving depends on the types of websites a person normally browses and the type of content they normally read. This type of ad could simply feature a particular brand that a person recently searched for, or it could offer a specific promotion or offer related to something for sale on the page the user is currently visiting. Orchestrated ad serving is a hallmark of contextual advertising.
One of the biggest differences between the work of print ad networks and online ad networks is the driving technology. While an ad network once had to maintain contacts with multiple publishers, today it maintains most of these networks electronically, in what is known as an ad exchange. An ad exchange is a type of computer program that uses algorithms and data from various sources to generate prices and availability for certain types of ads on a portfolio of websites. Personal contacts are increasingly scarce.