K2 Design Selects AdKnowledge

Palo Alto, CA-based AdKnowledge Inc. said that K2 Design selected its SmartBanner to manage, serve, and report on clients’ Web advertising campaigns.

K2, a New York City-based interactive advertising agency, uses SmartBanner to serve in excess of 30 million impressions per month for its clients. Financial arrangements were not disclosed.

AdKnowledge’s SmartBanner serves and reports on ads across more than 650 Web sites. The company was formed as a result of the merger of ClickOver and Focalink Communications.

“K2 is constantly seeking out better ways to maximize advertiser ROI through interactive advertising,” said Joe Apprendi, senior vice president, media and promotion at K2. “And some of the best new capabilities are those from AdKnowledge. We’re one of the first interactive ad agencies to standardize on a centralized ad serving service, and we chose SmartBanner as our strategic partner.”

K2 is using SmartBanner to provide “closed-loop media reporting” which enables K2 to report to clients how ads on each Web site are performing, not only against click-through rates but also with factors such as leads and e-commerce transactions.

“We’ve integrated our back-end reporting system with SmartBanner ad serving to manage media activity against client-specific buy objectives, not simply click-rates,” said Apprendi. “This integration enables K2 and its clients to quickly quantify campaign success based on cost-per- order and revenues per customer, while matching this information back to the media source.”

SmartBanner enables K2 to respond to campaign results by rotating ads and changing creatives immediately.

K2 has also been a long-time user of AdKnowledge’s MarketMatch, an independent Web campaign management solution for ad agencies and advertisers.