This week AdAge published a story announcing that CBS interactive is dumping ad networks. In the article, AdAge recaps the longstanding debate on whether or not Advertising networks are good for publishers.

What I’ve come to understand is that it’s a fair-weather situation. When publishers have large media buyers knocking down their doors, publishers don’t need ad networks to fill the rest of the space.

A good example of this from my recent experience has been with national military sites. Because the military receives full rate card for run of site from the Government, I can’t purchase ad space in just the San Diego market. In fact, on one phone call to a military site I won’t name, I spent half an hour describing what I wanted and when the rep finally understood, I heard a chuckle on the other end.

The same thing applies for large publishers. If big advertisers are buying out their space, why deal with the headache, and paperwork of ad networks who slice up their inventory into a million different pieces, all for less money?

So, now that the economy is turning the corner, CBS and other sites with the power of over 60 million unique visitors per month can go back to their old ways when things were simple and advertisers paid big money for the space.

As a boutique agency with smaller clients, we rely on ad networks on a number of levels. Using an ad network allows us to:

• Be very targeted by using the ad network’s established filters (i.e. I want to reach females over the age of 35 with annual household income > $100,000).
• Appear on large, credible sites, which allows our brands to appear larger by association.
• Deal with one contact, one contract and deliver one suite of creative to appear on thousands of sites in front of our target market.

In short, it’s incredibly smart and efficient for us.

So, if CBS has set a tone that will carry through to other large publishers, I’m worried about my ability to get my clients optimal exposure without spending profuse amounts of time (and money) strategizing, coordinating and adapting creative.

With that said, I see one positive result of publishers taking their interactive ad programs in house. This time around, they have mined their own site(s) for information on their users to offer more sophisticated ad programs. They act as their own mini-network. So for those advertisers who have the time and money, you can look forward to a more effective spend.