AdCamo, the service for advertising in the background of web pages, is re-launching today as a platform for web sites and ad networks that want to offer the format to their clients. For publishers, this means if you want to sell background advertising, you can use AdCamo to manage campaigns and serve inventory. For ad networks and agencies, there is an API so the AdCamo platform can be integrated into your own systems and software.
The backbone of this strategy is something that AdCamo calls the Platform Management Interface, which features many of the same tools you’d expect in an ad platform, but designed specifically for the background ad format. You can create new campaigns, track impressions and clicks, and view details on a unique metric for the format called Time Before Click (TBC) that lets you see how long it takes someone to click on the background ad.
Of course, the big question about background ads is whether or not websites will adopt them because of the obvious aesthetic issue. As I noted in my earlier review of AdCamo, the format is often used by MySpace, but hasn’t seen massive adoption by the small-to-midsize publishers that AdCamo would seem to be targeting with its new strategy. To try and address this, AdCamo is offering 3 different ad formats that publishers can use: Tiled, Projection, and Pillar.
And, these formats actually seem pretty flexible. While the “Tiled” format (the same image repeated over and over) is perhaps a bit obnoxious, Projection and Pillar are neat because the background isn’t actually a glaring ad, but rather imagery that compliments traditional banner advertising placed elsewhere on the page. My favorite is this sample coffee ad, where the background is coffee beans, with a banner ad for them in the middle of the page:
