Niche contextual targeting companies have assessed the coming competition from major network players like MSN and Yahoo, and they're confident enough to be talking smack, according to a ClickZ story. "'Contextual' is just a nicer way of saying 'run-of-network' buys," said one confident executive of a search engine marketing company. These niche players know that a critical mass of targeting is necessary for advertisers to start to get efficiencies. For the concept to work, the channels need to be fairly narrow, and the biggest media players tend to have quite broad categorizations of their media. An agency executive agreed with the notion, saying that some placements work, and some don't, and the advertiser needs to have visibility as to where the media ran - and even when - in order to make campaigns come out ahead of non-targeted campaigns. The larger networks tend to report campaigns as one big globule of media, without breaking down precisely where ads ran. ClickZ asked Yahoo about its plans, finding that the company intended to give advertisers additional control, but not the ability to run media within vertical categories.