AdBrite Teams Up With Live Nation

Ad network AdBrite has announced it will power a new ad management dashboard for concert promoter Live Nation. The eFan Finder application is an extension of the existing relationship between the companies that placed geotargeted event ads throughout AdBrite’s network of 50,000 sites. This now brings campaign management and reporting down to the band manager level.

“We’ve been working with Live Nation for a year and they want their local constituents to know how well all this stuff is working,” says AdBrite VP of Marketing Paul Levine (who previously ran Local for Yahoo!). “This works at the age-old challenge in local advertising of tangibility. We’ve built a system to have local marketers see where their ads are.”

This essentially plays off one of AdBrite’s differentiators as an ad network in that it offers site level transparency. In other words, beyond traditional analytics, its dashboard indicates to marketers the specific sites where their ads can be found. Too often in online ad campaigns (SEM and display), ads are fanned out to dynamic ad units ruled by whatever targeting metric is in play, but it’s difficult for advertisers to actually go and see their ad.

This is arguably more relevant for SMBs than national advertisers. The latter have dedicated marketing people who are happy enough with bottom-line analytics. But smaller local businesses sometimes need the intangible ROI that is the warm and fuzzy feeling you get from seeing your ad. This is another reason why online video is showing an early relevance to SMBs compared with SEM and other online ad media they’ve been pushed.

A full comprehension of local importance seems to be rare for ad networks. Placecast is doing some interesting things, and AdBrite has the benefit of Levine’s local perspective. Today’s deal is evidence of this, and it has good implications for similar deals in other verticals where there are national or regional entities with localized constituents (auto dealer groups, real estate agencies, hotel chains, franchise-based corporations, etc.).

“We have exclusivity with Live Nation in events but we’re interested in forming relationships in other verticals where this same kind of dynamic exists,” says Levine. “You can see the same thing in retail, insurance, auto, fast food or any of these categories where it’s a national organization with local interests. We’re having lots of discussions now.”