Looking to expand its contextual offering, Yahoo!’s Right Media exchange and Lucid Media have signed an agreement that will enable publishers and advertisers on the Right Media Exchange to take advantage of contextual opportunities.
This signals a change in Right Media’s previous exhortations about the importance of transparent, single site buys. Having sipped at the contextual Kool-aid, executives appear to have noticed how well the AdSense/AdWords network has performed for Google.
Bill Wise, the dapper Right Media general manager, said in a release, “LucidMedia’s ClickSense technology will significantly help increase the prospective yield of a publisher’s available inventory and improve an advertiser’s ability to contextually target ads to relevant content and categories through the Right Media Exchange.”
How exactly the new contextual offering will work for advertisers and publisher on RMX is unclear. For example, will advertisers be provided with full site lists of the contextual network? Will RightMedia let publishers name their own price for their inventory?
Apparently, the “contextual” component is dependent on the categories to which an individual publisher tags its inventory.
The release also states that under the agreement, “Yahoo’s Right Media will support buyers and sellers that use LucidMedia’s contextual advertising engine ClickSense.” Perhaps this is the beginning of an inside sales team for Right Media. Why not?
