Contextual Advertising Comes to P2P networks through Brand Asset Digital

File sharing sites and advertising haven’t been two notions that would complement each other. That is because most mainstream advertisers would rather keep their brands clean of any association with such ill-famed names and illegal content, and nearly all the major ad providers don’t allow their ads to be shown on such sites. So, naturally, some else stepped in – instead of having your regular Adsense units or mainstream display advertising, fringe players crowded the net with porn and gambling ads.

Here’s where Brand Asset Digital wants (and dares) to set things straight offering a contextual advertising network that targets search results on file sharing sites.

With Brand Asset Digital’s P2Pwords advertisers are able to target promotional messages to users based on what they’re looking for on services like Limewire or eMule. When you search for a term just as when you normally do it on a traditional search engine like Google, for instance, you receive a list of results. This is where the catch takes place – those results include contextually delivered adverting messages.

Joey Patuleia, the founder of the service, told the LA Times in an interview: “This is the most unleveraged, unbranded, unmarketed space in the history of the Internet.”

Among the advertisers who have opted for using the service are Vitaminwater, Dial Corp, General Motors, and numerous independent music artists. We’re rather curios to see how the entertainment industry will react to this. However, we can guess that the news of companies such as General Motors advertising on P2P sites will not make them smile too much.