I had written about it a year ago in Customized PPC Search Engines for Corporations - a fantastic opportunity for Google…or any company smart enough to pick up on it.  And now, FAST has (picked up on it)- see the excellent Businessweek online article.

"…If it works as billed, AdMomentum could signal the start of a new era in ad networks. "It's a digital marketplace in a box," says Sue Feldman, research VP at IDC. "It's going to allow big content creators to build ad networks. We're on track to the long tail of ad revenue."

Since Corporations often have their own internal branding, their own cross sell/up sell opportunities, why not just function as their own publishers and advertisers within the corporation?   But until now – there was no engine specifically built for it.

According to SearchEngineLand in a post titled FAST Introduces Private-Label Contextual Ad System:

"…Enterprise search firm FAST has launched AdMomentum, a contextual advertising system that let's publishers manage and serve their own advertisements, bypassing Google, Yahoo and other third-party contextual advertising services. FAST calls the platform a "revenue engine," and is targeting small & medium sized enterprises and vertical search sites."

Here's part of an official press release announcing AdMomentum:

"…FAST has tailored the development of the platform to meet the specific needs of online media companies, retailers and telecommunications service providers. Among other features, the platform offers customers the ability to sell locally and nationally, a self-service environment for their advertisers, and multiple ranking algorithms and innovative customer interfaces to better match the needs of both their audiences and advertisers. "

TechCrunch has an even better description of AdMomentum:

"…AdMomentum provides publishers with a GUI to manage their site’s ad zones from purchase to delivery with tracking analytics. The system supports a variety of familiar advertising models that can be applied to the different ad zones: keyword auction, CPM, CPC, CPA, and flat rates. Ad zones can host ads based contextually on user input and page content in various formats such as videos, banners, and text links on the web and optimized mobile sites. Context can be determined based on keywords, geography, content, and a users click stream data. Having your own ad system also allows for finer grained tweaks to the system, such as how often the ad bot crawls pages to determine the advertising context. Australian search engine Sensis and US local search engine Local.com have been trialling the product for a while now. The sites have been selling ad inventory through their own marketing departments and through branded self-serve platforms. Sensis’ Bidsmart ad market allows anyone to bid on keywords or buy spaces in ad zones which can then be placed in an approval queue." 

Last year, when I had the insight for this idea (I don't know when FAST came up with it – I guess I can imagine maybe I inspired the idea – but more likely, FAST came up with the idea of an internal corporate contextual (PPC) engine themselves). 

NOTE: Nothing in AdMomentum specifically states that it be used in the way I suggest; AdMomentum, it appears, is a Contextual Search Engine Platform (with PPC and Contextual capabilities – you can just make another version of AdWords with it or you can run in internally, within a corporation – which is what I'm suggesting is it's best application).

At least, I know that my gut instincts are right on – once again (you have my post from 1 year ago to prove it); and, I've been right a lot more often than I've been off.

Last year, I compared Dell, HP and IBM's internal ads and, knowing the limitations of my own environment, suggested there was an opportunity for Google to come in with a "private label" contextual search engine.

So what can you do with a Private Label Contextual Search Engine if your a Corporation?   Let me tell you what I think you can do – link up content from across product and service lines in a much more "natural" that's driven by contextual relevance instead of corporate policy – making a much more interesting experience for visitors – and if done right – more rewarding.

There's also a possibility for different divisions/brands to make "money" by being both the publisher of their own content and an advertiser across the internal "private label" network.  What's even better – the Private Label Contextual Search Engine keeps tracks of impressions, clicks and conversions – something that's eluded many corporations, many, many businesses.

I'd like to see a version of AdMomentum so I can test it out myself – but want to mention to FAST …..well done!   AdMomentum is a much more important innovation than what it sounds like – just consider what will happen if FAST can sell this to many of the larger corporations – it's a big deal.

Here's how I can see AdMomentum working in a corporation like IBM, HP or DELL:

Brand manager of IBM XSeries or HP Pavilion Laptops, for example, acts as a publisher by designation pages of their sites to be used to run contextual advertising (by other brands with in the corporation).  Every time a visitor clicks on a ad (no cheating, please!) XSeries or HP Pavilion gets credited and the advertiser gets charged (IE: an ad for refurbished XSeries server running under IBM's Refurbished equipment could turn up on current offer page under Storage Group (a different Brand within the company).  Wealth is "naturally" transferred from one brand to another (tracked by AdMomentum on the back end) and both the Advertiser and the Publisher (both internal brands, profit).

You can pretty much do this for any business – of almost any size.

Now if many of the corp

orate pages, the ones deemed important, are open to contextual advertising from other parts of the company – you've achieved something naturally that's almost impossible to do well deliberately – deep linking content.  And all of this can be personalized by IP Address, by location, by language…YES THIS CAN BE A BIG DEAL.

Now, this is just my idea, my vision – in no way is anything I'm saying here, policy for any company I know of, today.   But it appears, with AdMomentum – my ideas can be realized much easier.  Of course, there's political issues that any corporation has to deal with – and that might be more difficult to work out then the technology (nothing new about that).

But I'm glad that my idea of a year ago appears to have taken root.