TC50: Advertising & Commerce Monetization session roundup

The advertising and commerce monetization session seemed interesting to both the crowd and panel of experts alike. The final company to present, OtherInbox got cheers from the crowd for its idea to get rid of email inbox overload, but drew criticism from a expert panelist.

Burt: Recommendations for advertisers

A Swedish company that hopes to make a way for advertisers to create compelling campaigns. Its site walks the advertiser through step-by-step ad text creation, and provides recommendations for text that may be particularly relevant to certain readers.

Adgregate Markets: Targeting through widgets

Adgregate provides a more symbiotic way that advertisers and publishers can work together — all while improving user experience. The basic idea is that it serves ads in a page on widgets. The benefit of this is that on click you don’t leave the page you are on, instead information the ad is conveying is expanded below the ad. You can make transactions right within these widgets, and they’re secure — even if the websites they’re on are not.

This will open up the online ad space from a “measly” few billion dollars, to a $130 billion e-commerce market, company chief executive Henry Wong said.

AdRocket:

Insert ads into email blasts and newsletters. Most emails that go out have either no advertisements or are non-targeted ads. AdRocket aims to make these ads targeted and relevent, which will of course lead to more click-throughs. Obviously this is an idea that a lot of people want to do, because emails are so much more personal and tailored than say, a webpage. But no one has yet to nail this.

The company made sure to note that while personal data goes in, and ads do come out, the personal data never comes back out. Obviously people have fears about relevant in their emails (Gmail’s are at least on the side). A big question is how make sure these ads get by spam filters and other blockers.

OtherInbox

This company claims to offer a solution to a problem that a lot of people have: Email inbox overload. The service creates an easy way to make multiple email address based on a certain domain and manage them in a way so that if you are getting spammed, you can focus on which address is getting bombarded and neutralize the problem.

This company got cheers from the audience after presenting (as I said, a lot of people are overwhelmed by their inboxes), but Ash Patel, the head of Yahoo’s Audience Products Division was on the panel of experts judging this panel. Patel wondered if this hadn’t already been done — by Yahoo.