Posted by Adam T. Sutton in Internet Marketing Systems	August 27, 2007

The online ad industry is growing and becoming more personalized, so take advantage

By Adam T. Sutton, Managing Editor, Mequoda Group, LLC

Google's wild success is fostering an age of ad experimentation, and the future could offer extremely targeted ads in a wide variety of places online.

One week after our post about companies trying new online video ads, YouTube announces that it's offering InVideo ads to "select partners."

The ads are "animated overlays that appear on the bottom 20 percent of a video. If you're interested by what you see there, clicking on the overlay launches a deeper interactive video ad that we think is relevant and entertaining. (The video you are watching is temporarily paused.)," according to the YouTube blog.

There will be complaints from users that want uninterrupted, ad-free content, but YouTube is owned by Google, and Google probably wants a return on its $1.65 billion investment. Why wouldn't it monetize the over 3 billion minutes of video watched there every month?

In other online ad news, the Wall Street Journal reported last week that social networking website FaceBook is working on an ad system that will "let marketers target users with ads based on the massive amounts of information people reveal on the site about themselves."

The new system is expected to launch this fall and will "let advertisers visit a website to choose a much wider array of characteristics for the users who should see their ads," according to the article.

Those characteristics are expected to include age, gender, location, favorite activities, preferred music, and even the users' "friends'" information, according to the article.

Both of the ad systems described above are contributing to the increasingly personalized nature of online advertising. As these companies continue to innovate, it is becoming easier for advertisers to reach an ideally targeted audience. The hope is that hyper-targeted ad campaigns will result in higher response rates, but only the future will reveal if these hopes are well founded.

Keep an eye out for new ad systems that could help you. As they are in their development phase, you may be able to pick up a great deal on what proves to be the next Google Adwords.