More than ever it’s become really easy to be instantly informed of developments and trends happening minute by minute. The web has become a real-time zoo of information. Advertising in the future is going to get more and more targeted because we have more data at our fingertips. But we can already do some very nimble marketing as it stands today. Here is a great way to benefit from developing trends. If you have a (small) business, monitor keywords and watch for news stories relating to your business. Find out where the stories are breaking, specifically on which sites, visit those sites that stand to get significant traffic and start advertising on that site. If it sounds easier than it sounds, it is. But it’s not that hard either – if you’ve done it before.

I’m busy wrapping up a website audit case study and during my research I noticed some breaking news. An interesting news story specifically about the type of product the business I was auditing services: hummus food. Turns out that there is an interesting dispute between Lebanese and Israelis, about the food hummus, resulting in a record breaking hummus dish, which made the news. Many news sites feature advertising you can bid for, providing you know the network through which to buy them, you can bid on specific pages and have your advertising appear on news items that are relevant to your business.

This level of granularity in advertising is a wonderful way to leverage trends and the fast proliferating news coverage we see on the web. This type of advertising could work well for certain types of business and is definitely worth experimenting with. It is the kind of intelligent advertising I think we will seeing much more of in the future and perhaps a way to boost the profitability of online news sites, who are in general clamouring for inventive revenue strategies like these. The question is, might this type of advertising work for you? There is only one way to find out.