Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Coming Soon: Your Friendly Neighborhood Pop-up Ad

Hometown newspaper reports on Infrastructure Engines, which has a patent pending on something you'd think would have already occured to someone else out there: an ad server specifically for ISPs that lets them serve ads for, among other things, local advertisers. (Come to think of it, I could swear that Siemens (yes, that Siemens) was trying to market something like this a while ago, but now I can' t put my finger on evidence of that.) Company President Bob Feather tells me that they so far have one customer, Access Unlimited, a local Sarasota ISP (granted, Infrastructure Engines launched only a few weeks ago). The system, called Content Insertion Engine, allows ISPs to serve a variety of ad formats, including pop-ups as well as on-screen DHTML ads onto every page that users surf while connected to the ISP. The system does not, however, enable any kind of targeting of individuals. Feather envisions ISPs using it to sell ads to local businesses like pizza parlors. Pricing for the system starts at $35,000. To my mind, it's going to take a lot of pizza ads to pay for a $35,000 system (local, small businesses are a notoriously hard sell in the ad market), but I do wish them luck.