NEW YORK: The Internet has allowed consumers to trade stocks without using high-priced brokers and let travelers book flights directly from airlines.
Now it may free advertisers to make their own television commercials without going through a traditional ad agency.
Several companies are offering automated ad creation over the Internet and, in some cases, ad placement services that all advertisers can use to more finely direct their marketing. Advertisers use the new sites to select from commercial footage and customize campaigns with a few clicks of the mouse and little human interaction, often for a low flat fee.
"When people say, 'you're commoditizing creative,' well, sure we are," said Jordan Zimmerman, chairman of Zimmerman Advertising in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who calls the automated service "a virtual advertising agency."
"But we're really doing it with excellent work," he said.
The new systems threaten some of the roles that advertising agencies have traditionally played. National advertisers, mainly in the retail, real estate and auto industries, are using the systems to make their messages more relevant on the local level.
They can automatically add names of local sales agents or dealership addresses, and they can change the content of the ad, depending on where it is showing, to appeal to various demographic groups. Among the companies that have used the services are Wendy's, Ford, Coldwell Banker and Warner Independent Pictures.
Zimmerman, an advertising agency that is part of Omnicom Group, is selling stock advertising and online buying for television, the Internet, print publications, radio, direct mail and in-store ads.
The automated system they are offering to advertisers, called Pick-n-Click, is currently available only for automotive advertisers. It has 150,000 components — like voice-overs, video footage and text options.
AutoNation, a franchise group of 331 car dealers, has signed on as a customer. Zimmerman plans to expand the site's ad offerings to other retail areas, like home furnishings, in the next few months.
Visible World, based in New York, introduced a product this week that allows advertisers to create thousands of custom versions of television commercials. The company also plans to add online and mobile video ads to its system soon. And Spot Runner, an online ad agency based in Los Angeles that has been offering to make local television commercials for $499, plans to branch into automated radio and Internet ad development this year.
Interest in these systems is being driven, in part, by the increased use of customization in traditional media like television. Advertisers are increasingly interested in taking what they have learned in the online world about custom marketing and applying it in the off-line world.
"If there's a man and a woman watching television in two different houses and you are Procter & Gamble, it would be more efficient to show one of them an ad for a Gillette's men's razor and the other a woman's ad," said Mark Read, director of strategy at WPP Group, an advertising holding company that has invested in Visible World and Spot Runner. "In the scenario when you run the woman's ad in both houses, you've got half the efficiency."
To customize ads, the companies, to a varying degree, link postal codes with census and other third-party data to develop local demographic profiles, isolating viewers more finely than typical cable operators.
Visible World has an extensive system in place, running a distribution network through media partners and using the partners' routers to steer versions of ads to different parties. Visible World works at the household level by using information from cable set-top boxes.
The result is that Visible World can automatically run ads in Spanish when its databases determine that is appropriate or can send more youth-focused ads where younger people are likely to be watching.
Another company, OpenTV, a part of Kudelski Group, a digital security company based in Switzerland, is delivering multiple versions of ads to cable set-top boxes in partnership with a cable operator and uses viewer data to decide which ad to show.
Invidi Technologies, a company based in Princeton, New Jersey, has developed an ad system that uses remote- control behavior and other viewer actions to guess which member of a given household is tuned in.
In addition to tailoring ads to consumers, the new systems allow advertisers to modify their ads at the last minute by logging in online.
"You find out at 10 p.m. your competitor is running an intense sale on something," said Michael Goldberg, chief marketing officer for Zimmerman. "You can go into your arsenal of work and select something to combat that and program it to run the next day — all in five minutes."
The Web interfaces eliminate the need for advertisers to call or meet with ad agencies to fashion or tinker with their ads.
But humans are not entirely removed from the process. They are still involved in shooting the footage for the campaign options online and managing the new sites, among other tasks.
