eBay joins European Interactive Advertising Association
Six months ago eBay launched an international business division to sell targeted campaigns across eBay’s collection of international sites, based in London. The division is headed by Christian Kunz who said that eBay’s “unrivalled product transaction data would enable brands to get closer to sales by directly targeting consumers with a high propensity to buy”.
Today the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA), a pan- European trade organisation for media companies, announced eight new members including eBay with Christian Kunz appointed to the EIAA board.
The primary objective of the EIAA is to champion and to improve the understanding of the value of online advertising as a medium, to grow the European interactive advertising market by proving its effectiveness, thus increasing its share of total advertising investment.
The EIAA members are AD Europe (Orange, United Internet Media, Libero), AdLINK Group, blinkx, CNN International, DoubleClick, Disney, eBay International Advertising, Gruner + Jahr, Linkedin, LYCOS Network Europe, Microsoft Advertising, MTV Networks International, Platform-A, PREMIUM PUBLISHERS ONLINE, Smartclip, Specific Media, wunderloop and Yahoo! Europe.
I guess this means that 3rd party adverts on eBay are not only here to stay, but that eBay are committed to punting off-line advertisers to investing in online adverts. To generate profit for eBay there’ll be no surprises as to where those online adverts will appear.
Ed (BuildaSkill) says
3:50 am on 14/01/2009
Hi Chris – I’m guessing the advertisers without eBay seller accounts will have their adverts appear on sellers’ view item pages – there were some announcements last year (that I vaguely remember) indicating increased advertising real estate on the view item pages, but I can’t remember if it was to be for the new seller ad-channels, google-ads, or more direct ads by offsite vendors.
A key issue here is whether there will be search-related linking – e.g. a buyer searches for an iPod mega-geek edition, gets the search results, and when clicking into the listings, lo – there are adverts by Apple for the mega-geek, in the eBay seller’s listing.
If that route does get employed, then sellers are going to have to be very attentive to pricing and P&P, and spend a lot more time protecting themselves from VeRO.
On the other hand, such advertising (linked apples to apples by product or brand) could be a reason for companies to back-off from using VeRO and let the sellers increase the advertising for the products by listing them.
I notice from your post that Disney and Microsoft are involved – in the past, both have been accused of excessive zeal in the VeRO program.
Ed