Amidst the mayhem of the current AdMonsters Publisher Forum in New Orleans which brings together ad operations professionals and their ad technology vendors comes news!
AdMeld, led by CEO Michael Barrett and founders Ben Barokas and Brian Adams, has released a new tool for client publishers.
AdMeld‘s FireMeld enables the ad operations team of web publishers to view advertising media characteristics – such as network origin – and take action.
From the release:
“..you can use FireMeld to turn off an offending ad or send a pre-written note to AdMeld’s support team to take the appropriate action.”
A sample note (not provided by AdMeld) might read, “Holy smokes, AdMeld! Get the Adult Friend Finder ad off the bible study site before I lose my freaking job.”
In that its primary use is communication with the AdMeld account team, the Firefox plugin is available only to AdMeld clients.
From our perspective, and without having tested FireMeld, this tool is a next generation of the freeware Fiddler Web Debugging tool which has been widely available for a few years and allows users to track HTTP traffic. The key differences with FireMeld are integrated delivery management and communication.
Editor’s note: Making an AdMeld-branded, HTTP discovery tool available to the wider, web publishing public would make sense for AdMeld (or any yield optimization company) as part of a viral marketing campaign – presumably without the direct AdMeld communication features, etc.
FireMeld may not be a huge technological advancement, but it’s a clever “hook” for clients paying licensing fees who should enjoy seeing a bit of value-add from their investment. Anything yield optimization companies can do to enmesh themselves with their client’s day-to-day operations makes sense for ongoing customer relationship management.
The insight provided by the tool works well with the advertising exchange model as large, branded sites look to protect their pages from unwanted ads while benefiting from the real-time matching provided by yield optimizers such as AdMeld, Rubicon Project, PubMatic, Yieldex, YieldBuild and others.
