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Adcamo, the company based in Scottsdale, Arizona re-launched yesterday as a background image advertising platform. Previously, the company was an ad network itself using the same technology which now it leverages to publishers and other ad networks. By doing that, Adcamo can concentrate on improving their technology and also function as a gatekeeper (Google is also a gatekeeper in advertising, which made them rich).

Background advertising was never touched before (except MySpace to some extent) and Adcamo patented this technology (patent-pending, actually) and it empowers others to use it. That means publishers who wants to sell their background as an advertising space now can use Adcamo’s technology to manage this. The company also released an API which can be used by the ad networks and agencies to integrate into their own systems or software.

Their platform not only offers features which can be found in a standard ad platform (create campaigns, track click, impressions, view details – similar to Google AdWords or OpenX platforms), but also offers a unique feature: TBC (Time Before Click). This metric measures the time from when the page loaded until the user clicked on an ad, which indicates how effective an ad is: the sooner a user clicks on an advertisement, the more effective that advertisement is.

They offer three background ad formats:

–tiled background (the image is spread to fill in the entire background and it moves as you scroll up and down (frankly, I don’t like this format because it can ruin the design of a webpage and make it look amateurish…look at MySpace pages, and you kinda get the idea).

–pillar (the image stays on top of the background and when you scroll down the background image disappears towards the top – I believe this is the best background ad format so far. It’s not that intrusive and certainly not ruining a webpage design too much; it actually blends with the design tendencies in the last period of time).

–projection (in this case the background image is in fixed position so when you scroll, the content scrolls too, but not the background image – this is a compromise between the two options above).

These three formats are also clickable (yes, you can see the background ad but you can also click on it).

These background ad formats will make publishers and ad networks/agencies carefully choose the banners they use for their campaigns. The publishers will want banners that won’t spoil the design of their website/page and will also give them a good payoff. The ad networks/agencies will probably work with the advertisers to make banners that won’t interfere too much with a website design. The banners are sometimes tied to the background image, so whatever is shown in the banners will also show up in the background image. But sometimes they are not, so the background image and the banners could be separate yet complement each other.

Now, the only thing left to prove is if the background advertising will take off. I’m pretty sure many users are very annoyed by the pop-up ads, pop-under ads, layer ads, and interstitial ads, so I think it has a good chance.

Will they be annoyed by the background ads too? (and, by the way, there’s no way for now to block the background ads like there are ways to block pop-up and pup-under ads).

If the users will embrace this kind of advertising (like they embraced the text ads) then Adcamo could be quite successful as a business.

What do you think as a user (publisher or advertiser)? Do you see Adcamo winning this potential market? (I am pretty sure the competition will start popping up, maybe using other variations of this theme).

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