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Rebranded Image Space Media Revamps Pub Interface

ADOTAS – No one at in-image advertising service Image Space Media — which has just rebranded itself as ISM and introduced a sharp new logo — was fond of the original name: PicAd. You gotta admit, it’s a little dull.

However, when describing the service provided, Chief Operating Officer and co-founder Kevin W. Tung was always referring to the catchier term “image space”; lo and behold, a search found that the name was open. The team, which had just been formalized in October 2009, went with it in the hustle and bustle to get the company off the ground and threw together a logo.

As the company now delivers several hundred million ads a month to more than 40 million unique users, the executive team decided it was time to do the marketing shuffle. Working with Dig Marketing and incorporating feedback from focus groups, Image Space Media has emerged from its makeover as ISM. Now that’s got zazz.

To celebrate the rebranding, as well as the refurbishing of its publisher administration tool PubStop, the crew is turning their booth at South by Southwest Interactive into a hootenanny, with hot dogs, Frito pie and a reportedly bottomless keg of Shiner Bock.

Tung, a photographer whose background is Chinese, was inspired by the difference in surfing sites in Asia compared to the U.S. Rather than the simple search function on Google’s homepage, Asian portals tend to be more image-based like Yahoo!’s homepage, encouraging users to click on thumbnails.

With founding partner Raymond Chan, now chief technology officer, Tung analyzed the portion that images (filtering banner ads and such) made up of the content of the most popular U.S. blogs — images clocked in at close to 40%.

“I always wondered why no one was monetizing that huge chunk of real estate,” he said. Obviously, the task was up to Chan and him.

They brought an image-monetizing technology prototype to TechCrunch 50 at the end of 2008, where they received a wealth of healthy feedback — for starters, the demo version, with pop-ups similar to in-text ads, was deemed too intrusive by publishers. After several rounds of refining, the crew created an in-image overlay that stayed within the borders of an image and an improved matching system.

In 2009 the company gained traction with publishers, reaching out to popular blogs and pages and explaining the service –- but then it went viral.

“People would see the Image Space Media ads on their friends’ or competitors’ blogs and they’d sign up,” said CEO Jesse Chenard. “Publishers saw that it was incremental and wasn’t cannibalizing their ad sales or any other revenue they were getting. Feedback from their audience was: ‘We don’t mind these ads; they’re not offensive or intrusive.’”

Without spending any money on marketing and with little-to-no press, ISM has signed up more than 2,000 publishers to use the in-image advertising service.

Finding the right revenue stream for an image is highly contextual. ISM’s taxonomy examines not only an image, but also the tags and names for both the page and image are processed through a weighted scoring system to matching it with one (or more) of hundreds of thousands of offers coming through the company’s ad network on a daily basis. In addition, ISM features a team of natural language processing experts and employs demographic and audience targeting.

Other companies provide similar services, but Chenard sees no strict competitors. ISM will put an ad in any image, while competitors like Pixazza look for images with celebrities and merchandise to link to affiliate marketers. Chenard thinks that’s very niche and just a small bit of what can be done across the entire image space;

“We see ourselves as bulk,” he commented. “We’ll take all the image views and do our best to monetize them.”

Somewhat like a Google AdSense account, the revamped PubStop offers publisher more than just a control panel to manage domains and set payment info. ISM has implemented a drill-down reporting system to allow pub to analyze from a top level in terms of click-through rates all the way down to domains and the actual image.

Chenard believes PubStop can be more than a reporting console –- in the long run, he hopes it can be tied into publisher’s own systems as well as third-party systems. Potentially ISM will create an API to allow pubs to automatically select their chief revenue driver front-page image.

“We’re not necessarily the big domain-controlling empire,” he said. “We want to give the ability to integrate our service with other content management systems and other publishing platforms. We want to make that as easy as possible.”

Looking forward, the company wants to expand its offerings beyond the current ad format of call-to-action text, adding display and rich media features. Chenard hopes to sell not just on an action basis but also an audience basis in terms of reach and frequency.

“As we get on the right sites and they look for guaranteed revenue around these things, that’s going to become a need,” he said. “If done right, the attention given to the image space will be extremely valuable; if we target the right ads to the right users in the right context they will engage with them… and we’re going to eat that value out of the image space.”