Burst Media erupted into the Internet advertising space back in 1995. In 2008 the company is serving ads to almost 50% of the US Internet world, which accounts for approximately 118 million people, according to figures published on InternetWorldStats.Com.

David Cooperstein, Chief Marketing Officer for Burst Media, gave AdMarkTech an insight into the ever changing online advertising world, where Burst Media is focusing its own marketing efforts and what the future holds in store for Burst Media.

As the Internet becomes a content driven phenomena, finding publishers is key to Burst Media. They have a repository of 4,600 sites where they begin in order to figure out which sites to include with each new product. “We will do searches, talk to our publishers and see which sites they compare themselves to. We also use Comscore to find out some of the publishers that are in the same general space and recruit those.”

“Looking at a site from the perspective of is it a good site? Does it have relevant content? Is it focused on the type of content that it offers? Most of our sites are interest based sites that are very focused on good specific content. We will also read articles and identify content as we come across it. We use Alexa as well. Like anybody in the market we use a combination of internet resources and talking to publishers. We’ll be running advertising soon on Sitepoint, which is a good resource for publishers.”

Making use of a vast direct sales force, Burst Media literally goes out and meets with each advertiser that they’ve built a relationship with. It is these agencies and the long standing relationships forged with them that are the backbone of Burst Media’s direct marketing efforts.

“From a pure marketer standpoint there are two major leverage points that we’re using currently. One is PR. PR is very powerful in this business because a lot of people read their daily newsletters, they see something that intrigues them or happens to hit home with them and they’ll call us. This year we’ve had a substantial amount of success with our PR efforts focusing on different audiences for different vertical networks.”

In addition, using Constant Contact as their bulk emailing technology, Burst Media has also increased the amount of HTML emails that are being regularly dispatched. “We also have an online banner campaign that we’re running. The banner campaign is running primarily in newsletter sites. Later this year we’ll be doing more with landing pages and direct outreach.”

David believes in ‘practice what you preach’ advertising and has partnered with in-person, layer ad specialist Rovion to enforce a personal message of trust and credibility. The Rovion technology is currently being used on one of the most recent vertical network additions to the Burst Media stable, cdkitchennetwork.com, a food network launched in February of this year. “If we’re going to be in the online advertising business we should be trying some of our own tools, so a lot of our partners are willing to help us with that.”

With the exception of video, all of Burst Media’s targeting capabilities, optimization and the ability to pinpoint and report on individual sites is all built in-house. Now as predictions of growth in the mobile advertising world begin to come to fruition, Burst Media has reached out to Quattro Wireless as their mobile partner.

“Quattro have traditionally worked with large publishers and we are bringing to them our base of publishers to introduce our publishers to a new world which is the wireless world. Quattro can take a site and very easily turn it into a nice looking mobile site. We are trying to look beyond just the website from a targeting standpoint and get into creating mobile sites for our publishers and ultimately be able to serve targeted ads to the mobile site.”

For mobile publishers, Burst Media would like “to provide publishers with the opportunity to monetize their content and then go through a life cycle from being a small publisher of a single site to growing and becoming a large publisher.”

Stating the mantra of advertising networks “You have to build it before they come.” David continued “There’s a chicken and egg problem of building the inventory before you get the advertisers on board, so we’re in the inventory phase of that program.”

Learning a lot from the partnership with Quattro, David stated “We’ve seen a lot of mobile traffic on sports sites, cooking sites, news and information sites, so there’s actually a fair amount of traffic building out there. We’re talking about the ads within a [mobile] browser session and there’s typically only one ad at the top of the page and everything else is content.” This is the mainstream view why conversion rates for mobile served advertising are currently higher than online.

Talking about the RealGM.Com mobile site recently developed by Quattro Wireless “It’s a pretty elegant way of being able to look at a website and the publisher doesn’t have to constantly update it. It’s on an RSS feed. A feed is taken from the website so that the content is always updated in both places. It’s a very nice compliment to the website.”

But what does the future hold in store for Burst Media?

“We have two main businesses. One is our ad network business which is used to build a brand network and a performance network. The second is an ad management capability that is sold to major media companies. It can handle everything from start to finish in terms of building vertical ad networks. It can do everything from creating proposals and tying it in with customer systems, all the way to marketing the campaign and paying the publishers, so it’s a full service offering.”

Examples of recently launched Burst Media vertical ad networks are Family Travelers Ad Network, Green Ad Network and CD Kitchen. Additionally Burst Media will be adding mobile and video capabilities for ad networks.

With the growth of the Internet and likewise, vertical ad networks, there is a potential to see the market for vertical ad networks becoming crowded. However, in the space of vertical ad networks, it’s a very complicated thing to be able to build and provide service around. “We’ve been doing it for a very long time so we’re confident of our position on that front. On the selling of the inventory on those vertical ad networks, if the company’s big and they want to sell it themselves, we can help them with the business rules to do that. If they are small and want to build a vertical ad network with us as a partner and we become the ad sales part of it, that’s great too.”