AOL's Advertising.com today announced a new initiative with rich-media technology provider PointRoll to bring to market the industry's first solution for optimizing rich-media advertising interaction rates - the percentage of times an ad has been rolled over or clicked on to launch a panel.

PointRoll's rich-media interaction data will be automatically entered into Advertising.com's proprietary AdLearn technology to optimize online campaign delivery in real-time toward those sites in the Advertising.com network that produce the greatest interaction with the featured advertisement, the companies said.

"This…will fundamentally change how brand advertisers manage rich-media campaigns," said Rob Clark, vice-president of channel development at PointRoll. "Our rich-media interaction data is highly coveted in the industry, and by feeding it into Advertising.com's award-winning optimization technology, it can now be used to generate immediate lifts in campaign performance."

"Interaction is a vital metric for advertisers focused on consumer engagement with their brand," said Mollie Spilman, chief sales and marketing officer at Advertising.com. "The ability to optimize for such engagement will take online marketing to a whole new level - enabling advertisers to measurably increase awareness, recall, favorability and more through prolonged consumer/brand interaction."