Agencies love eye candy - because their brand advertisers do. Nothing worst than having your brand advertising displayed alongside inferior and inappropriate content. Adnetik released a tool this month that allows advertisers the capability to value of the content and context of a URL in real-time. Here Nathan Woodman, COO, Adnetik, gives more overview on the AIM Index.

Can you an overview of the AIM Index?

NW: AIM Index™ values URLs by the quality and relevance of the ad environment.

Is this just contextual targeting? Isn’t this effectively a step-up from ad verification?

NW: Contextual targeting is similar to relevancy but it is not exactly the same. Contextual advertising uses a pre-existing taxonomy to fit a page into a category. AIM Index's relevancy score ranks every URL based on its similarity to an existing seed. Each seed is relevant to an advertiser because they handpick it. The output is a customized and categorized list that is unique to each advertiser.

In addition to relevancy AIM Index scores the quality of the ad environment. For example, when we use Index we know which pages have 3 ads and which ones have 25 ads. This type of information is not currently valued in the exchange environment. We feel that this undervaluation is a primary factor that keeps premium publishers away from the exchanges. AIM Index is a vehicle that premium publishers that share our view can sell into, plus it’s a vehicle for advertisers to weed out the good from the bad in the existing ad exchange inventory.

What issues is the AIM Index looking to solve?

NW: We feel that most advertiser who currently work in the exchange environment only value the audience as it relates to performance and not how it relates to the quality of the page and its context. AIM Index provides advertiser with the assurances of view-ability and relevancy. We think these attributes are valuable to any marketer but more valuable to marketers that have largely stayed away from the ad exchange environment to date.

How would the AIM Index wok in a typical campaign?

NW: AIM Index is a customized white list of URLs built for a specific advertiser. The white list, depending on the criteria, can range in the millions. The Index is integrated with AIM, but we consider its potential application to be broader in scope.

Are there extra costs involved in using AIM Index?

NW: Yes of course. The tool provides substantial value to the advertiser compared to the alternative of non AIM Index exchange buying.

Let’s say the EU forced every publisher to have a hard opt-in for third party cookie tracking. Could this work as an effective stand-alone targeting tool? Does we still need behavioural to allow granular audience targeting?

NW: AIM Index is a URL scoring tool that works independent of cookies.

Will this feature be available to clients in Europe?

NW: Yes, it is available now. The quality score is available in all European markets and relevancy is available in the UK for now but the other markets will soon follow.