NEW YORK--(iMedia)--James Piper, head of West Coast sales for Vibrant Media, took center stage at a Spotlight presentation during iMedia's Brand Summit in Coronado, Calif., and immediately addressed what many observers regard as one of the best features of in-text advertising. Like search, in-text is an advertising means that was designed for the interactive industry, and one that has no direct corollary in traditional media. Also, like search, in-text drives benefit for both direct marketers and brand marketers with tremendous scalability.

The fact that it is a new, interactive-only technology, and one that drives benefit for the entire triangle (consumers, buyers, and sellers), makes many in-text observers extremely bullish on the future of this segment.

Also, unlike search, in-text can make publishers serious money on their own sites, and it requires no new inventory, thereby creating new revenue streams for both premium publishers and — in some cases — smaller, endemic sites and even bloggers. Users who visit these precisely topical sites and blogs self-qualify to a deeper degree than those on more mainstream sites, thus making in-text something of a secret weapon for brands with an ad message that can be leveraged topically within content keywords.

iMedia Summit host Sarah Fay opened Piper's remarks via video, saying, "We have to pass the content-worthy test" with our new marketing technologies. In-text certainly does that, and its growth as a segment is testament to its efficacy.

According to Vibrant Media's research, roughly 45 percent of all page transitions come from links, and its technology was designed to enable brands to become part of these links, while providing informative, useful, and sometimes even entertaining messages and images.

The first example Piper showed filled the useful bucket — a recipe campaign for Hellmann's Mayonnaise. The campaign, which had run on a number of food-related sites, had underlined terms such as eating light, healthy, delicious, sandwich, and diet, with messages countering the premise that mayonnaise is not good for consumers. Within the ad unit, consumers were then offered recipes and promotions/coupons that apparently perform so well that the campaign has become an ongoing staple for many Vibrant Media food clients.

Another particularly effective and interesting campaign Vibrant ran was for Zune, with music being streamed into the unit when it's fully open — and not just any music, but music that was relevant to the term that had been underlined in-text.

"iMedia Summit host Sarah Fay opened James Piper's remarks via video, saying, 'We have to pass the content-worthy test' with our new marketing technologies. In-text certainly does that, and its growth as a segment is testament to its efficacy.”

Vibrant Media and other in-text providers also are growing their B2B businesses, with Piper showing a very detailed campaign the company ran for HP. For this campaign, Vibrant built a unit that showcased multiple products, servers, rack servers, etc., right within the unit, creating a microsite that would launch whenever a user moused over terms like "server." Showing all the configurations for the servers and products right within the microsite, and providing additional units that featured white papers that could be downloaded as PDFs by registrants, made for a tremendously successful campaign. It not only provided tremendous performance, but also provided branding value for HP on the sites frequented by its buyers and champions.

Vibrant Media claims 80 million unique users in domestic reach, and 120 million globally. Unlike competitors, it has no self-service platform for publishers. Each of the company's roughly 4,000 publishers works with someone within the company, including MSNBC, FOX, MSN, iVillage, and numerous pharmaceutical and automotive sites.

What's next? Look for Vibrant to leverage its relationship with Yellowpages.com to target the fast-growing hyperlocal business.

About Vibrant

Vibrant is a world leader in contextual technology, aligning billions of words across the internet with relevant video, information, tools, and advertising. With over 4,000 premium publishers, reaching more than 135 million unique users per month (comScore, May 2009), Vibrant gives top brand marketers the opportunity to deliver highly targeted advertisements within premium Web content and offers publishers premium editorial tools to re-circulate users throughout their websites. The company, founded in 2000, has offices in London, New York, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris and Hamburg. For more information, visit: www.vibrantmedia.com, www.vibrantmedia.co.uk, www.vibrantmedia.de, www.vibrantmedia.fr.