What a week. It’s been a whirlwind at ad:tech New York (an encouraging sign our industry is poised to rebound), OMMA AdNets just wrapped, and today we announced our Media Partner Program, with IDG TechNetwork as our launch partner. We’re proud to be working with such a top-tier media company and excited about the prospect of including their sites in conversations we monitor and place advertising. This is the start of good things to come as we expand our program to additional partners in categories like entertainment and lifestyle – and help media companies recognize their conversational relevance and value in a whole different way.

Working with media partners gets us closer to a theme that is steadily brewing in the advertising world: The idea that a combination of quality content, innovative targeting and audience data might just be the future of digital. As audience becomes “king” and advertisers are increasingly able to segment audiences and make buys accordingly, targeting based on content also must evolve to add a layer of value beyond just rendering a contextual ad on a page. Being able to target ads to people I know are in the market for my product is one thing – being able to target those same people as they actively engage with related content that is trusted and influential is another. This hybrid approach, outlined by ThinkEquity VP Robert Coolbrith at OMMA AdNets, requires lots of folks – technology companies, agencies, publishers, data providers and the like – to play nicely with each other. The good news is, as cautious optimism continues to take hold, I’m confident we can put our heads together to figure it out.

Related Links: MediaPost: From Ad Networks To Audience Aggregation: Where Advertising Is Heading