Scott Karp has an interesting post today on the Publishing 2.0 blog about the state of relevancy (or lack there of) when it comes to display advertising.

This is one of the reasons why businesses and ad agencies have a hard time making display advertising work when it comes to lead generation. The lack of relevancy of display ads often plays out in the form of low click rates, or even worse, low conversion rates.

The Matchpoint ad unit doesn’t have the same problems as the typical display ad. Publishers can use fine grain controls to specify exactly which provider category they want a form to be displayed for in any of their page placements across their sites.

For example, if you have a site, section or a article about choosing the right college or masters degree program, you can add a Matchpoint form widget to your site for “student loan” and we will return a qualification form that matches users with up to five providers of products or services relating to student loans. If you have a site or content about cars/automobiles ask Matchpoint to serve a form for “auto loans” or “auto insurance”.

Matchpoint helps solve the relevancy and low conversion problem for advertisers/providers as well. Because each consumer completes a category specific qualification form and then confirms their interest via e-mail, the Matchpoint process weeds out consumers that might have clicked on an ad by mistake or through casual interest. Our process ensures that we are matching providers of products and services with relevant consumers!

New products like Matchpoint are going to provide more ad unit options for publishers to choose from that in many cases will be more relevant to their audience than run-of-network display ads or even Google Ad Sense.

But don’t take our word for it. Give it a try for yourself.