InterActiveCorp launches ad network, including for brands it's ditching

InterActiveCorp mogul Barry Diller may be getting rid of brands like Ticketmaster, LendingTree, and HSN, but he still wants to sell ads on them.

The sprawling media company announced Monday that it will launch an ad network to handle inventory across all its brands, such as Evite and Citysearch, as well as the ones that Diller and his executive team are opting to spin off into separate publicly traded companies.

"Maybe we're not brothers and sisters, but we're cousins," IAC Advertising Solutions president Rich Stalzer told AdAge about the companies it will spin off. The AdAge article also reported that IAC currently serves only a small percentage of its own ad inventory, outsourcing the rest.

IAC's new ad strategy focuses on targeting consumers in nine "cubes": youth (18 to 34 years old), men, women, "affluents," parents, active shoppers, active travelers, homeowners, and sports fans. More cubes are on the way. But of particular priority to IAC is the "affluents" niche, which can draw in far higher click-through rates because of those consumers' likelihood to spend larger amounts of money.

For once, IAC's arguably scattershot and unfocused array of retail and media brands could be helping it move forward.

That's because there are many ways that IAC could identify Web users as "affluents" (or anything else, for that matter) through the sheer variety of properties the conglomerate owns, as well as the ones that it is spinning off.

"We're in a unique position in that we can corroborate multiple kinds of data," Stalzer explained in a release, "including declared information users offer about themselves; transactional, online purchasing activity; and inferred, such as what they do offline like attend concerts or go on dates, from the diverse portfolio of IAC sites to more precisely identify users as part of a particular audience segment."

Someone who makes pricey purchases at the company's Gifts.com, for example, or who repeatedly queries Citysearch for restaurants of the Jean-Georges and Nobu variety, could be classified under the high-income "cube."

And Diller, well known as a yacht aficionado, is even more deeply connected to the luxury-brand market than your average CEO: He's married to fashion legend Diane von Furstenberg.

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As a network, IAC is in a unique position to capitalize on the brand value and scale of well known properties (e.g. match.com, citysearch, ticketmaster, lendingtree, evite, etc.), while at the same time leveraging the targeting that the diverse set of assets and Ask.com's search data can provide

Execution will be key.... getting all the entities to move in step is a tall order. That said, they've got an immediate head start over a typical new ad network.(e.g. reduced chicken v. egg issue between advertising demand and inventory)... could become a formidable player