Incisive first called into the Grapeshot office by telephone in August 2006. The request was simple. They wanted something that worked like Google Adsense, but was a controlled set of ads they could source and contextually place on the page.

What has now become a best-selling tool for the flagship Investment Week and IFA Online titles in this B2B publishers portfolio, started as a simple idea. Back in 2006 the sites were selling out of all display ad inventory so there was pressure to grow revenues in other ways. Simple. Grapeshot was tasked to provide a Direct Response capability where videos, brochures and other marketing collateral from the existing display advertisers, could be displayed as "Advertorials" against only the pages that were relevant.

Incisive, as a B2B publisher, chooses the advertisers and collects the majority of the revenue from this Adsense-like format: contributing massively to overall page yields. Indeed the eCPM of this hybrid ad format that showcases advertiser brands in a small right hand ad slot adjacent tothe page article, measured Click Through Rates more than five times the normally expected. With a hybrid display and per click pricing model, this new format linking audience to advertisers' own marketing collateral improved page yields by a staggering 200%.

Grapeshot was particularly pleased to go live with a finished solution before the first face-to-face meeting with the customer. The whole Advertorial solution uses just one line of generic HTML code on each page of the Incisive website. Incisive's technical team had the code installed in two minutes.

Two weeks of testing and giving advertisers a dry run of the new display/CPC format resulted in a >95% sign-up rate with advertisers. Incisive and Grapeshot were both earning new revenues, before it was finally decided that the Grapeshot team should actually meet up face to face to see their new business partners. The whole project was done over the phone and email, without any need for protracted discussions or interference with any additional IT or editorial staff. The ad sales team was booking new revenues, without the help of Google, and without the need to even meet with Grapeshot.

The success of the Advertorial product, called "Context" by Incisive, led to an escalation from Incisive's one Investment Division, to working with CTO and Strategy Director at Incisive across all divisions. It was clear that that there were other important ways to leverage the "grapeshot" embedded in each and every article their journalists write.

Grapeshot can suggest related articles, related jobs, related media, as well as related ads. Grapeshot went live in 2008 on their volume traffic site The Inquirer, with the task of swapping in virtual channel categories to contextually and behaviourally impact and optimise DoubleClick ad campaigns. Grapeshot deployed generic one line HTML tags inside each page to contextually and behaviourally profile the grapeshot of each page and user. As the page loads in the user's browser, the Grapeshot server calculates and inserts the appropriate channel category into the DoubleClick ad tag, in real-time.

Many campaigns saw a significant increase in Click Through Rates (CTRs) as ads were targeted to relevant ad slots, without the need to manually tag each ad tag to fixed editorial categories.

Grapeshot instead swapped the categories or channels in real-time, evidencing the channel category sent by Grapeshot to the DoubleClick ad server by the many words actually seen on the page. No more "Spray and Pray" Run of Site campaigns. Incisive could book Run of Site ads, but still lift the CTRs by intelligently swapping the ad traffic across their page views, using the intelligence of Grapeshot to optimise the ad calls in real-time.

In April 2009, Incisive's Commercial Director asked "can Grapeshot consistent lift CTRs?" across all campaigns for the whole month.

Put simply, the answer was yes. This has led to a strategic roll-out of Grapeshot Targeting across all titles in the Incisive Media portfolio.