deviantART today launched the next phase of its self-serve advertising strategy with a service entitled adPro. adPro allows professionals and comercial organizations to directly advertise on deviantART and reach the web’s largest creative community.

adPro is powered by the latest version of Shiny Ads self-serve advertising platform. It allows the advertiser to create a display ad using easy-to-use tools including banner templates, target the campaign by country, pay via a wide array of options and then track the performance of their campaign.

Since the entire ordering process is automated, including the ad insertion into deviantART’s OpenX ad server, transaction expenses are significantly reduced. This allows deviantART to lower its price point to attract small and local businesses that would traditionally not be able to afford such a campaign and would spend their small ad budget elsewhere such as ad networks.

“We’re excited by the launch of AdPro, powered by Shiny Ads.” said Ernie Riemer, VP of Advertising, “The platform Shiny Ads provides allows us an efficient and customizable way to offer a great product to the large number of small businesses looking to advertise on deviantART”

Having smaller advertisers purchase online ads in a self-service interface isn’t new. Google AdWords launched in 2000 and has become the de-facto standard when small advertisers think of online advertising.

But this is actually a problem. Smaller advertisers don’t think to look anywhere else to advertise other than Google and when the adventurous do contact a web site’s direct sales force, they get an unpleasant surprise with the large minimum buys, unknown industry terminology and a process that isn’t catered for an ad-industry outsider.

This explains both the excitement that self-serve advertising technology has with web publishers for its revenue generating potential, but also the myth that by just making it available, “they will come” and purchase ads.

As with any early technology, promotion is key to educate your customers and to break through the myth barriers.

Last week, we had one of our largest clients create a promotion with their existing Shiny Ads self-serve advertising platform. They increased the clicks that their advertisers could purchase, but kept the price the same. At the same time, they promoted their “Advertising Sale” aggressively throughout their web site, including the home page, with eye-catching banners and buttons. They also upgraded their ‘Advertise Here’ page with more instructions on the process to get their advertisers more comfortable with the concept.

The promotion was a huge success, increasing their revenues, and more importantly, adding new 1st-time advertisers, who will return.

Because small advertisers don’t necessarily know that they can directly purchase advertising on your web site and they normally don’t visit your ‘Advertise Here’ page, you need to promote and educate to supercharge your direct self-serve advertising revenue.

By making small advertisers aware, educating them on the benefits and the process, and by giving them pricing options that work with their budget, your self-serve advertising revenue will become a major part of your overall online advertising revenue (along with your direct-sales and ad network revenue).

When I arrived in Toronto from California’s Silicon Valley, the high-tech capital of the world, I was concerned that Toronto wouldn’t have the network of tech companies and people that I had been accustomed to.

But over the last several months I have personally seen a side of Toronto that most living outside of it never see. Toronto is full of smart and friendly tech “connectors”; people who selflessly share insight and personal connections to help out others. You would expect that from your advisory board, and they definitely have produced, but it is inspiring to see it from friends, colleagues, and most times, just first-time connections.

Thank you from everyone involved with Shiny Ads for connecting us with investors, prospective customers, and brain-storming with us on new ideas and opportunities: Ari A, Casey R, Chris S, David C, Jay H, Jay G, Jeremy W, Jonas B, Jonathan T, Jose L, Mike B, Rob K, Richard R, Trevor H.

On another note, we are hard at work on several major new features that will greatly expand the reach of Shiny Ads for our web publishers customers. November and December will be very busy months, which in the start-up world, is a good problem to have.

We are happy to have deviantART.com launch their Shiny Ads implementation after a couple of weeks of testing. deviantART.com is using Shiny Ads to allow their artists to advertise their artwork on the site in a 300×250 sidebar ad unit. Their pricing model is CPC and their pricing options range from $20 to $1,000.

They are also using a new beta feature of Shiny Ads that allows them to “skin” the advertising interface to look like the rest of their web site.

You can see it at deviantart.com

Dogbook (& Catbook), a very popular Facebook application, is now accepting advertising orders right inside their Facebook application using Shiny Ads’ advertising widget.

They embedded the advertising interface right into the Facebook application and thus it looks like it is part of their own interface. They are using a product list of packaged impressions.

You can see it in action here.