Two year old ad network Bluelithium has received a Top Innovator of the Year Award from technology publisher AlwaysOn as well as being named for the second year a Top Private Company Innovator. Bluelithiums’s claim to fame is its network of 100 million people reached through 1,200 sites and its ability to target those people through demographics, geographics, behavior and context. Recently, Bluelithium added the ability to deliver targeted video ads either within banner or pre-roll.
Because I don’t completely understand the current differing ad network models, I asked Bluelithium CMO Dakota Sullivan to explain where Bluelithium fits into the puzzle. Unlike ad networks that act as sales reps for site publishers, Bluelithium works for the advertiser, buys ad impressions from site publishers – just as any other advertiser would, adds that publisher to its network and resells the inventory to advertisers who can use the company’s targeting technology to reach a particular group of people based across its 1,200 sites using varied targeting metrics.
Bluelithium, as well as other to be fair, can “follow” people across its network of sites and serve ads based on a particular profile no matter what site, within the network, they are on. Sullivan says ad networks are shifting from the site rep model to a model which seeks to provide advertisers access to only the people to which they want to market with layered targeting that helps eliminate wasted ad impressions. Oops, that sounded a bit like a press release. Sorry. It wasn’t I promise I wrote that myself. What Bluelithium does is not earthshatteringly new but it just seems they’ve rolled together a lot of nice online ad targeting capability. I certainly don’t know everything but if I were buying online media right now, I’d certainly want to check out Bluelithium knowing what I now know.
