AdSense invites publishers to display brand advertising ads

Google's advertising program AdSense has invited publishers by email to join the so called custom placement packs program which is to enable advertisers to find and target publishers under a certain topic easily. In the email, it says:

After a recent review of your site, we would like to include [your doamin] in our custom placement packs program. Custom placement packs are selections of individually-reviewed sites designed for our largest brand advertisers.

We would like to feature your site more frequently in these advertiser packages, but to do so, we need you to place more image and text-enabled medium rectangle ad units (300×250) on your site. Visit https://www.google.com/adsense/adformats to see a sample of the medium rectangle unit.

The medium rectangle is the most demanded size among our brand advertisers that utilize these packages for both text and image ads. These advertisers want to ensure they reach visitors on high quality sites like yours, and are willing to bid more for ads prominently displayed on these sites. They require that the units be placed “above the fold” on a page so that the ads are immediately visible to your site’s visitors without scrolling down.

If you decide to add medium rectangle units to your site, please notify us by replying to this email so that we can begin featuring your site in more of our advertiser packages.

We also recommend you use the newly launched ad placements feature to define your ad slots to advertisers so they can bid on specific placements on your site. For instructions on how to create ad placements, please visit https://www.google.com/adsense/suppo...y?answer=50691 .

My first impression is that this act is the follow up to the ongoing reports that Google is expanding its brand-advertising which means large brand-name advertisers will have more opportunities to appear in quality sites in Google's content network (as joining the program is on an invitational process). This act would definitely increase the incentives of large advertisers to spend more on advertising on Google as most of the invited sites are of high traffic. I suppose these brand name ads are bid using CPM. We want to hear from those who have been invited!