Are you happy with the ads you, the website publisher, are given? What if you could create your own ads? You know your audience best, right?

That’s the idea behind Bedrock. The way Bedrock works is that publishers create ads on their site, which could be as simple as a text ad, an image, or a Flash animation. Then they pass a set of keywords associated with that ad to Bedrock through APIs and Bedrock has advertisers bid on those keywords just like they do with search ads. Every time somebody clicks on the publisher-created ad, it goes to a different advertisers based on who is bidding the most for the underlying keywords in a realtime auction.

Let me illustrate this through an example. If you run a gadget site and you have a bunch of forums where people like to talk about Plasma TVs, you could create a generic ad with a graphic that says “Buy a Plasma TV.” You pass Bedrock the keyword “plasma TV” and advertisers who want to buy that keyword bid for your clicks.

Sounds simple. Except I could easily see some publishers try to abuse the system by not clearly indicating what is an ad and what is content, or hiding the ad directly in the content. So Bedrock won’t necessarily result in better, more relevant ads. For instance, a publisher could simply hyperlink valuable keywords in an article and make that an ad, or place a line of text under real headlines as an ad, which borders on being an advertorial.

What do you think, can you create better, higher-performing ads than advertisers?