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The internet's has growth and maturity over the past ten years has fueled a remarkable boom in the online advertising industry. Online advertising has marked considerable milestones and grown in leaps and bounds when compared to traditional media advertising, but the internet has kept pace with such growth, carving out a much larger role for itself in the consumer's decision-making process.

The recognition of this evolving environment has spurred a strong desire for traditional agencies and advertisers to reach consumers and build better brands via online channels. There are solid reasons for the migration of large advertising, marketing and branding budgets to the internet; budgets that in past were assigned solely to traditional media such as television, radio and print.

The internet has altered the playing field for marketing products and services forever: customers are already using the internet as the desired medium of choice for myriad products and services. There are a number of factors that contributed, and continue to boost the rapid growth of the online ad industry. Each day the online audience continues to grow and new online property and content is created and introduced.

Another important factor in this growth is the acceptability of, and the increasing reliance on, the internet by the average consumer. 'Surfing the 'net' has recently replaced watching television as the preferred national pastime. Even the experts agree: according to a study commissioned by industry benchmark DoubleClick, the internet has outpaced television and print ads in influencing consumer purchasing behavior.

Goldman Sachs marked the year 2005 as the "breakout year" for online advertising. Goldman expects the online ad market to reach $12.3 billion by the end of 2005. The same study also states that that approximately 59 percent of homes with internet access will have broadband by the end of 2005, increasing the opportunities for presenting bandwidth-intensive rich media advertising.

Furthermore, Merril Lynch projected online ad spending to reach $12.4 billion for 2005, with more than 40% of that growth attributable to performance-based advertising. According to a May, 2005 report by Forrester Research,

"Consumer broadband adoption has made the Internet a pervasive influence in users' lives. Marketers have responded by pushing more of their budgets online…The $26 billion that marketers will spend in 2010 in online display ads, email, search, and classified ads will represent 8% of all advertising spending — rivaling spending on cable/satellite TV and radio. Almost half of all marketers plan to increase online ad spending by decreasing spending in other channels."

For advertisers, the internet is quickly becoming the advertising medium of choice because it offers an unprecedented ability to reach a specific target audience and achieve real results. The success of an advertiser's online campaign can be measured in real-time by user actions such as a click-through, form submission, subscription, lead or sale.

After the rapid deflation of the Cost Per Millennium (CPM) banner ad bubble, the online advertising community - especially the financial services industry - started to move away from the Pay-For-Traffic (i.e.- CPM) model and started to adopt the results-driven Pay-For-Performance (PFP, i.e. – CPA, CPL, CPC) model.

The shift to PFP advertising has radically altered the online marketing and advertising strategies of large and small financial services firms alike. The PFP model has become an ideal method for smaller financial advertisers to not only target but actually reach their consumer segment markets via interactive online channels. Their advertising budget expenses no longer stem from ad-broadcasted statistics but rather depend solely on a specific predefined action.

Similarly, for large financial services firms the PFP method has become the ad model of choice as it enables the firm to achieve two goals simultaneously for one price: branding and customer acquisition. Since publishers are only paid for a specific action, the display of the financial products or services of the firm creates brand awareness and achieves the firm's branding goals. Financial publishers also stand to benefit greatly as they offer high-quality, relevant content and achieve higher revenues by obtaining leading online offers from the top financial firms.

BlueFN works specifically within the online financial services industry to help leading financial advertisers, agencies and publishers achieve a higher return on their investment. Although we have witnessed much progress in the online marketing arena, surprisingly little has been done to actually address the unique needs of the online financial services industry segment. Little has been done to enable the financial publisher to reap the benefits that pertain specifically to offering finance-related content or connecting to a financially-inclined audience.

BlueFN empowers the various players of the online financial services segment. We offer uniquely tailored solutions that assist all participants within this highly targeted market in leveraging out the pay-for-performance model's effectiveness to reach their true revenue potential.