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PAGEVIEWS

ICONOCAST
June 7, 2001

Showing Consumers Ads They Want To See: ZEDO

In a Nov. 1998 story, we quoted an Ad Age-sponsored Market Facts study that found the percentage of users who never look at banners rose from 39% to 49% that year. We summarized the article, saying, "Key business opportunity: Ad Specifier, a desktop program that lets users specify ads they want to see [stored in a milk file, after all what goes better with cookies?]."

Lo and behold, Zedo CEO Roy de Souza tells ICONOCAST his company has created adRemote, a pop-up menu under a banner that lets users choose what ads are shown. Souza says this "self-targeting" technique is pull rather than push.

Zedo has also developed a more efficient way to serve ads. Instead of deploying its own servers, Zedo uses Akamai and others to serve ads from "the edge." Because this technique eliminates one HTTP roundtrip between client and server, the "302, non-cacheable redirect," Zedo says it can serve ads in 0.2 second, one fifth the time required by traditional ad servers.