Today Tradedoubler announced that they would offer a contextual advertising creative format called AdMatch, promising a “market-leading contextual advertising solution”:

AdMatch launches across Europe on 31st March and is unique in its ability to serve ads across three separate ad formats: text, product and display. By scanning the content of web pages and facilitating the placement of ads alongside contextually relevant website content, AdMatch will help to improve the relevancy of advertising on your site …

Technically it seems to me that this is just a mix of the existing AdTool (2004) and a spider bot. The business idea behind it is good and other players have had great success with their contextual advertising solutions. Individual merchants such as eBay and Amazon as well as ad networks such as Google (AdSense), affilinet (affilimatch) or now Pepperjam have been offering this for years already. They all have a great inventory of advertisers on board.

But I’m not sure if Tradedoubler has got a product and creative library big enough for the world-wide web. Pepperjam or even AdSense might be the better solutions here, especially when it comes to usability. The Tradedoubler interface is a pain in the neck. But hey, you can prove me wrong.