Ad agency The Gate Worldwide had online portals and publishers bidding against each other in an innovative online auction, with the prize being online advertising dollars from a Gate client, reports MediaPost.

The advertiser, State Street Global Advisors, will run most of its ads on AOL, which won the bidding process. MSN will run a smaller ad package; but CNN Money, the only other major player in the auction, got nothing. Dow Jones & Co., Forbes.com and Yahoo Finance were invited to participate but declined. The auction was run via a platform designed by the firm Enversa and is one of about 90 that have been run in the last year.

Unlike most of the other auction services getting press, Enversa's deals with online inventory; the one developed by eBay focuses on buying and selling TV commercial time. Only three of the 90 Enversa-run auctions have not been for online ads (they were for out-of-home space).

The winning bids were, according to Gate, 30-40 percent below what it otherwise would have paid. Even those that opted out have come back to Gate to get in on State Street's ad spending. Gate Worldwide says they're hot on the system because of the time and labor efficiencies it produces as well as the market intelligence they can garner from the process.

Publishers that did not participatie said, as in Yahoo's case, that the platform conflicted with something they were doing already, or they simply didn't like the idea of taking the human element out of ad-space selling.