As more com­pa­nies join the con­tent mar­ket­ing band­wag­on, one start­up is lead­ing the way with a new plat­form designed to help them pro­mote their brand by con­vert­ing brand-site and oth­er web-based con­tent into ads.

OneSpot is aim­ing to change the face of online adver­tis­ing sales with its inno­v­a­tive approach. As more than a few adver­tis­ing sales man­agers, busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers and search engine mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ists know in their hearts, the rise of con­tent mar­ket­ing is qual­i­fy­ing the effec­tive­ness of more tra­di­tion­al ads.

Mak­ing mar­ket­ing inter­est­ing, not annoying

The firm’s CEO and founder, Matt Cohen, argues that it’s live­ly edi­to­r­i­al con­tent, not adver­tis­ing, which has the great­est impact on people’s opin­ions.  But he thinks that the con­tent vs. adver­tis­ing dis­tinc­tion is a false dichoto­my, any­way, because for most peo­ple the real dif­fer­ence isn’t between com­mer­cial and non-com­mer­cial but between “annoy­ing” con­tent and inter­est­ing content.

OneStop is ded­i­cat­ed to pro­mot­ing inter­est­ing con­tent, using live­ly blogs from a brand’s web­site or favor­able reviews of a prod­uct from else­where on the Web, and then repack­ag­ing them as ban­ner ads dis­trib­uted over a wider net­work. Cus­tomers fun­nel all their con­tent into OneStop’s sys­tem; all con­tent from a brand’s feed gets in auto­mat­i­cal­ly while that from dif­fer­ent sites can be added manually.

Clever tar­get­ing through relationships

Clev­er­ly, it tar­gets ads to indi­vid­ual view­ers, nudg­ing them sub­tly toward the out­come spec­i­fied by the adver­tis­er.  Vis­i­tors to a OneStop site get tracked by a cook­ie, where­upon it deliv­ers cus­tomized ads based on oth­er sites visited.

Cohen says that retar­get­ed ads usu­al­ly aim to dri­ve a par­tic­u­lar out­come (like sign­ing up for email alerts or mak­ing a pur­chase). But OneStop aims to build a rela­tion­ship with the view­er first, bring­ing the desired out­come about a lit­tle fur­ther down the road.

Ryan Koechel, direc­tor of e‑commerce at Rem­ing­ton (one of the startup’s ear­ly cus­tomers), said:

“OneSpot has been able to give us a ROI on dis­play ads that we would have nev­er thought pos­si­ble and we found OneSpot real­ly enabled us to come full cir­cle with our strat­e­gy. They are def­i­nite­ly the miss­ing link in our 360 degree approach to dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, are just as valu­able as PPC and com­ple­men­tary to every oth­er mar­ket­ing chan­nel we use.”

The com­pa­ny has just secured $1.5 mil­lion in a fund­ing round led by RSL Ven­ture partners.