FeedPowered Ads Set Creative Free, Scream for a Mashup

Yesterday, RSS marketing company Pheedo announced an innovative new ad product they're calling "FeedPowered Ads." It's a powerful model: publishers in the Pheedo ad network can embed an RSS-powered ad unit into their website/blog, new content is pushed to this dynamic real estate, including links, copy, and thumbnails. The true innovation here is the integration of a number of social book-marking services that the advertiser selects for inclusion in their ads, e.g., "add to del.icio.us," "add to digg." The promise of the new ad product is to unlock some of the creative muscle poured into official, branded destination websites, redistribute the content through the Pheedo network, and most importantly enable marketers to participate in broader discussions and word of mouth promotion through social networks.

This is especially significant considering that the first stop for consumers looking for information about products and services tends to search engines. And search engine results give preferential treatment to social media content - blogs, review and recommendation sites and discussion forums (which are all link-rich, frequently updated, etc.). Consumers are often intercepted by this content before they ever get to the flashy, official, branded websites or microsites. Being able to repackage branded content and push creative through blogs and other social media sites, and spread the word using tools like del.icio.us and Technorati tags, is a powerful idea.

I emphasize that this is the *promise* of the model and it's still very early - after all, this is version 1.0 of the FeedPowered ad unit. The impetus is on Pheedo to quickly evolve the ad product to a number of additional IAB-sanctioned unit sizes and integrate rich media content. As it stands today, having an RSS feed from YouTube in the ad unit does little more than promote click-throughs to YouTube, where the viewer may or may not tag and share the content. (You want to see the content before you digg it). The key will be to enable advertisers to push content through the feeds which result in rich, in-line video experiences.

To me the new Pheedo ad product screams for a mashup with an Internet TV service with deep roots in brand marketing. You can imagine a distributed widget pushed out through the Pheedo network that enables brand marketers to target video content to specific publisher genres. Imagine a feed from Kohler's Internet video channel adding new video titles directly to Pheedo ad units placed on DIY and home improvement blogs, websites and review services. Or the recent Haagen Dazs CGM campaign, "Scoop," repackaging video submissions and pushing the content out to gourmet websites and blogs for foodies to recruit additional consumer video submissions. In this context, the rich media content is experienced within the website or blog, which would trigger tagging and sharing on the spot - assuming the content is compelling and relevant.

Looking forward to seeing how the ad product evolves. It's definitely on the right track.

See Pheedo blog post
See related coverage in TechCrunch and BusinessWeek