The idea is to let the advertiser make himself available to customers and connect with them, right inside the ad itself. The process doesn’t require any extra downloads and doesn’t navigate you away from the page. The chat system is set up to route requests to any available agent within the advertiser’s office, or to send overflow requests to call centers trained to handle the inquiries.

All in all, this actually isn’t a half-bad idea for the 2.0 world. If it’s done well and placed on the right types of pages, it could add a valuable layer of interaction that’d be helpful to customers as well as to the company. Of course, it could also result in a lot of “prank” chats, but I think that’s where proper placement on the right types of pages comes into play.

Livemarkets has been around since last year. This acquisition, however, will mark its first mainstream distribution channel since its inception. Terms of the agreement aren’t being made public.

No related posts.

Google’s original announcement that DoubleClick would start powering Silverlight 2-based ads disappeared shortly after its posting this morning, leading us to question what was up with the deal. Google tells us, though, that the vanishing act was a result of a “glitch” on its web site and was unrelated to the deal itself. It was fixed just a few minutes ago.

So, it’s a go: The new partnership will launch with the monetization of 2,500 hours of Silverlight NBC Olympic content. DoubleClick’s already on-board for ad serving with Flash, RealMedia, and Windows Media, so the addition of Silverlight 2 only makes sense from Google’s perspective — though it’s probably not a positive reflection on Microsoft, with the company turning to its competitor for help on its own product.

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