AdReady’s template banner ads and media campaigns for SMBs will soon be available via Yahoo. The deal represents a major win for AdReady, which is already re-sold on a white-label basis by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Univision and MSNBC and runs 10,000+ ads a month.
SMBs who wouldn’t ordinarily take the initiative to hire creative can use AdReady’s products to launch a Web campaign, with AdReady acting as the agency. They can choose among 800 free templates for banners and have them customized for a media campaign, complete with analytics. Top categories include travel, auto, retail stores, entertainment, politics, health and finance (especially foreclosures and debt consolidations). The company adds and detracts various templates based on their effectiveness.
AdReady’s chief advantage is cost savings. Typically, minimums range from $5k to $25k for the premium service, although advertisers can start as low as $300 per month with self-service. That’s a significant advantage in an environment where the previous minimum display campaign on NYTimes.com ran $10,000 per month.
Yahoo’s use of AdReady sets it up for a theoretical conflict with its newspaper consortium partners. Hearst, one of the major players in the consortium, complained to Forbes that it is seeing Yahoo! telemarketers target some of its largest advertisers, including car dealers and furniture stores.
The perceived conflict may be overstated since newspapers (who are also free to work with AdReady, obviously) don’t generally provide the creative for their advertisers. Yahoo says the effort is largely aimed at upgrading its search advertisers.