As Shiny Ads marks its 2 year launch anniversary, we are bringing out a large set of new functionality in Jan 2012.

We’ve learnt a lot since launching our Self-Serve Advertising Platform for premium publishers in January 2010.   One of the most important elements to providing a simple and effective way for advertisers to purchase ads directly on a publisher’s web or mobile properties is how a publisher promotes their “new” self-serve advertising product.

Smaller advertisers are unaware that they can advertise directly on a specific website as there hasn’t been any technology to do that and all premium websites have a minimum ad buy amount that is typically much higher than what a small advertiser can afford.  As a result, since its launched in 2000, Google AdWords has been synonymous with self-serve online advertising for small advertisers.

To overcome this hurdle, premium publishers need to promote and offer incentives for their white-labeled self-serve advertising product.  One way to promote the new self-serve advertising product is to highlight it on high-traffic web pages.  The other way is to market and promote it to existing advertisers.

Today, Shiny Ads is launching a set of powerful marketing and promotion tools to assist our publisher partners in generating greater revenue from their advertisers.  Of course, all options are optional and highly configurable by the publisher.

Cart Abandonment Incentives – Automatically sends the advertiser an email plus an optional promotional discount code at specific intervals after they have created an ad buy, but have not paid for it.

Campaign Renewal Incentives – Automatically sends the advertiser an email plus an optional promotional discount code at specific intervals after their campaign is fully delivered, but they have not renewed and purchased a new one.

Frequent Buyer Incentives – Automatically sends frequent advertisers a promotional discount code to thank them for their loyalty.

Sales Events – Allows the publisher to set specific time frames throughout the year that trigger a sales event for their ad products and automatically emails their current and past advertisers about the upcoming sales event.

Special Promotional Broadcasts – Allows the publisher to quickly send an email with an optional promotional discount code out to all current and previous advertisers.

Weekly Campaign Status Emails – Each active advertiser now receives a weekly campaign status email displaying total impressions and clicks, plus the option to purchase another campaign form the same publisher.

Importing of Previous Advertisers – A publisher’s promotional emails can be sent to not only their advertisers on Shiny Ads, but also their previous advertisers.  Those previous advertisers can be imported quickly either from a list of email address or through our  SalesForce.com integration.

Today, Shiny Ads is releasing further enhancements to the Ad Product/Zone.

An ad product is how publishers define “what” they want to sell in their white-labeled Shiny Ads self-serve advertising product.  It is an incredibly flexible construct that not only allows for specific pricing to be set, but also targeting, the customization of lead times, validation rules and other options.

Targeting: Hour of Day, Day of Week, US DMA, US ZIP Code - These new targeting options, for the advertiser to choose, are now available along with the existing targeting options such as country, state, city, language, site, zone, placement.  Some targeting options only work with some supported ad servers.

Alternative Ad Server – Each ad product can now point to a different ad server and account.  This provides greater flexibility to larger publishers with multiple ad servers and accounts through out their network of sites.

Start Lead Time – This option enables the publisher to offset the advertiser’s selected starting date for their campaign. It facilitates a “lead time” for publishers with internal processing policies.

Flight Duration Pre-Set – A publisher can now choose to pre-set the default campaign flight duration. eg. 30 days.

Destination URL Validation – A publisher can set a root domain that all destination URLs must be a subdomain of.  All URLs are checked against a malware database and are rejected if they are found to contain malware.

Country Targeting PreSets – Ad products can be preset to target a specific set of countries, which prevents the advertiser from choosing which country they want to geo-target.

Order Sales Representative – To ensure compensation is allocated to sales representatives associated with assisting advertisers, this feature provides the option of requesting the advertiser to reference the salesperson’s name.

Defer Green-lighting the Approved Order – Publishers now have the option to defer “green-lighting” the inserted campaign in their ad server.  This option allows a further approval by ad ops for such items as ad tag validation.

There is a lot more new functionality coming out shortly.

AdWeek has partnered with Toronto-based technology company Shiny Ads to create the new Adweek Self-Serve Ad platform.

The service now lets anyone upload a 300 x 250 banner ad and secure a set number of impressions for as little as $500. This will allow marketers with any size budget to speak directly to Adweek’s growing readership. If you don’t have a banner design handy, don’t worry. Just use the platform’s tool set to create banner ad designs that will run alongside Adweek’s editorial content.

“The interest in Adweek.com has exploded since its relaunch,” said Adweek publisher Erica Bartman. “The new Self-Serve Ad Platform is a great tool for products and services looking to connect with Adweek’s readers, who are not only decision makers in every sector of the industry, but also executives looking for new and exciting ideas.”

“We are Adweek after all,” added Doug Ferguson, gm of digital at Adweek. “We should constantly be investigating and even experimenting with new digital ad models.”

The Shiny Ads technology integrates with Adweek.com’s advertising system, automatically inspecting available inventory and fulfilling self-serve clients’ desired number of impressions. That allows it to generate revenue from new sources while avoiding any interference with ads sold to clients by the Adweek sales team, which the system always grants priority.

“Shiny Ads enables premium publishers to generate revenue from sources which were either shut out from or were very unprofitable,” said Shiny Ads founder and CEO Roy Pereira. “Our products target sell-side automation of premium inventory and are geared toward maximizing revenues for online publishers.”

At Shiny Ads, we strongly believe in minimizing costs for our premium online publisher partners. Our architecture is built exclusively on that premise.

One of the unique features is the ability of Shiny Ads to directly integrate into our premium online publisher’s own ad server via its API.  Over the last several months, we’ve quietly added support for four new ad servers to better support our online publishers.

• 24/7 RealMedia OpenAdstream
• ADTECH IQ
• AppNexus DisplayWords
• OpenX Enterprise v3

The summer months are often a time when things slow down and we can play catch up (or at least play in the sun). That was not the case at Shiny Ads this year, although that is not a bad problem to have. With the arrival of fall, we have started to launch some of our new premium online publisher partners and we wanted to share them with you.

• CBS Interactive is a top-10 digital media company globally.  Shiny Ads now powers their smaller ad buys on CNET, ZD Net, Tech Republic, CHOW, Urban Baby, CBS Sports, CBS News, TV.com, and their other online properties.
• Unanimis, The United Kingdom’s largest ad network.
• Trend Hunter, the worlds largest “trend” portal.
• Ad Week, provide an insightful, forward-thinking magazine that appeals to consumers and advertising professional alike.
• Ad Operations Online, one of the best sources for ad-ops.
• PlayStation Universe, the source for all things PlayStation.

We are excited about the net-new revenue opportunity that our new publisher partners are entering through their white-label self-serve advertising platform, powered by Shiny Ads. Expect several more premium online publisher partners to be announced shortly.

If you want to check out a partial list of our premium publishers, go here;

According to a study by eMarketer and found on Mashable.com, global social network ad revenues will hit $5.5 billion this year and then top $10 billion by 2013.

This revenue is, unfortunately, concentrated mostly on Facebook and Twitter with some also going to LinkedIn.

So how does an online publisher get into this game and grab part of this revenue?

Well, according to TechVibes.com, “Shiny Ads helps online media publishers compete with popular social networks” with our new Audience Targeting product.

Shiny Ads Audience Targeting creates a “Social Ads” platform directly with an online publisher’s inventory and registered user data. It not only can acquire user data, target on that rich data, but also predicts which ads will generate more publisher-side revenue based on the viewer’s user data and historical performance of similar users.

AdOperationsOnline.com also posted an interview with Roy Pereira, CEO of Shiny Ads, where he goes into detail on what it is and how it benefits our online publishers.

If you are interested in Shiny Ads Audience Targeting, please fill out our contact form.

Shiny Ads announces the launch of our audience targeting & optimization solution called Shiny Ads Audience Targeting. The offering is an add-on to the core Shiny Ads Self-Serve Advertising Platform and enables online publishers to take smaller ad buys for highly user-targeted ads by leveraging their user’s data and thus increasing revenue and performance.

With the launch of the Shiny Ads Audience Targeting, online publishers have the same ability to offer a highly targeted social ads platform that the large social networks do. Shiny Ads Audience Targeting acquires user data, targets on that rich user data and also has an innovative prediction engine that in real-time calculates which ad would obtain the highest performance for the current viewer based on rich user data and historical data from similar users.

“Shiny Ads Audience Targeting is the first offering of it’s kind to be delivered directly to online publishers” said Roy Pereira, Founder & CEO, Shiny Ads, “It is further extension of our mandate to provide publishers with automation tools for the monetization of their premium inventory.”

Shiny Ads Audience Targeting is built to be scalable and able to handle complex targeting and optimization calculations in real-time. It is the first advertising technology entirely built on the brand new event-based persistent architecture called node.JS which gives the product tremendous speed and makes real-time machine learning with big data a possibility. Shiny Ads Audience Targeting is available to online publishers with registered users with optional gender, age, location and other information.

ABOUT SHINY ADS

Shiny Ads is an advertising technology company specializing in sell-side automation of premium inventory. Our award-winning Self-Service Advertising Platform is our core product offering. With Shiny Ads, smaller advertisers are able to quickly and easily purchase advertising without the need of industry knowledge, graphic designers, or a large budget. Shiny Ads is NOT an ad network, nor do we solicit directly from advertisers or ad networks. We are solution provider that supports your direct sales team and works in conjunction with your ad network – providing online publishers with access to an untapped revenue stream. Visit our website at ShinyAds.com or check out our demo at vimeo.com/shinyads/intro.

Shiny Ads will be down in New York City the week of October 3th for AdWeek.

Roy Pereira, our CEO, will be at the Maple Leaf Digital Lounge network reception on Oct 4th, 5pm at the NHL® Powered by Reebok Store.  Shiny Ads was accepted to demo to the AdWeek audience at this event for Canadian tech startups.  The event is being sponsored by the Canadian Consulate, PwC and C100 and will highlight Canadian innovative digital media companies to the attendees of the conference.

Zunaid Khan, our VP of Sales, will also be at the Ad Monsters OPS event.

At Shiny Ads, we take our work and play seriously. Whenever we need to blow some steam or if a team member needs a “shot to the head”, we pick up one of these Nerf guns and start shooting.

You can see that we have a variety of guns to choose from. The latest addition is the Nerf Vulcan, which is a fully-automatic machine gun with an ammo belt full of 25 bullets with its own tri-pod. I’m not sure how any new team members are going to top that gun…

Other favourites are the common (but modded) Nerf Maverick Blaster pistol for all-out fights, although the Nerf Magstrike AS-10 typically wipes out anyone in front of them. The Nerf Spectre Rev-5 on the other hand, is great for accuracy when you need to hit that one engineer who needs to drop their head phones and answer a question.

What’s you favourite Nerf gun? Or do you have another way to blow off steam at your startup?

Part 2 of 3: Exploring the technical approaches to self-serve advertising

In the first part of this series I addressed the problem and opportunity that online publishers face in servicing smaller ad orders. In summary, a self-serve advertising platform is a very effective solution for processing ad orders under $5000. In part 2 of this 3 part series, I will identify to the two primary types of solutions available to publishers today.

Self-serve via JavaScript

This type of solution is integrated into the publisher’s ad server via JavaScript and will require a bit more human involvement. Publisher’s ad ops team will have to set up a campaign for the self-serve solution similar to how they set up an ad network in the ad server. Therefore a specific amount of inventory must be allocated and will need to be monitored on an on-going basis.

Self-serve via API

This type of solution is integrated directly into the publisher’s ad server via an API. With this type of solution no specific inventory needs to be allocated since inventory availability is determined when the advertiser is ready to buy.

The automation factor of a self-serve advertising platform is key to maximizing publisher’s revenue from advertisers with smaller ad orders. An API based solution is fully automated with one exception; each campaign requires approval from ad ops before going live (for quality control purposes). All other aspects happen without human involvement including sales, campaign trafficking, reporting and payment. Whereas a JavaScript based solution, as mentioned above, requires ad ops team members to create a campaign, allocate inventory and monitor.

The API based solution also offers advertisers full targeting capabilities, which is a great incentive for advertisers with smaller budgets; most value for their dollar spent. This is not the case with a JavaScript based solution, which unfortunately does not have the same targeting functions. For example, it lacks ability to use key value pairs to target ads.

Why the different technical approaches?

Vendors using the JavaScript approach are typically an ad network offering self-serve as a value-add solution or come from an ad network background, they will also cross-sell other sites using their solution. The API based solutions, on the other hand, are pure-play advertising technology companies focused on solving a pain point for publishers while giving them maximum control and flexibility.

I hope you found this information valuable and would love to hear your thoughts on self-serve advertising. Feel free to comment below – let’s get the conversation started.

Also published on the AdMonsters Blog