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.

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.

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.”

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 is excited to partner with DigitalTown to empower their self-serve advertising. Local advertisers will now be able to advertise exactly where their audience is online and get the exposure that they are looking for without having to spend large amounts on online advertising,” said Roy Pereira, President of Shiny Ads.

“With this ad platform we will have a virtual billboard online at every highway, tying to every local high school zip code,” said Richard Pomije, CEO of DigitalTown.

Phase one of the launch will begin with simple monthly ads. Phase two and three will be released with multi-domain and national platforms built in, which will be rolled out through 2011.

DigitalTown will announce its pricing and ad inventory levels in its February roll-out.

Users can follow their favorite team by searching for their school under www.digitaltown.com.

About DigitalTown:

DigitalTown, Inc. in Burnsville, MN is developing a nationwide network of more than 27,000 local online communities for high school students, alumni, boosters and local citizens. For more information, please visit www.digitaltown.com.

About Shiny Ads

Shiny Ads, the innovator in self-service advertising platforms, helps the medium-large web publisher generate more revenue without additional costs by enabling the selling of display and text ads to smaller advertisers directly on a publisher’s web sites. Launched in January 2010, Shiny Ads’ customers include top-1000 sites with local news and special interest/niche topics. Find your lost revenue by visiting www.shinyads.com.

Safe Harbor Language:

Any statements contained herein related to future events are forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act 1995. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. DigitalTown, Inc. undertakes no obligation to update any such statements to reflect actual events. For more information, please visit www.digitaltown.com.

Company Contact:
DigitalTown, Inc.
info@digitaltown.com
(952)890-2362 (office)

Source: DigitalTown, Inc.

It was a great turnout with Gurbaksh Chahal keynoting and five social gaming presentation plus Shiny Ads presenting.

Many thanks to the organizers and to the audience for the great questions and interest.

We are happy to announce that a major feature upgrade has been launched in the last few days.

1) Doubleclick DART DFP ad server support; Along with OpenX, Shiny Ads now directly supports DART DFP for campaign and banner insertion and monitoring. Support for DART includes many of the pricing models previously available including CPM, CPC, CPD (except exclusive). In the next few months, we will be working on adding support for two other major ad server platforms. Also, we now support OpenX Enterprise Hosted.

2) Promotional Codes; Send a discount code to your best advertiser or to a disgruntled advertiser. In the “promotional codes” section, you can create one-time promotional codes with either a percentage discount or a fixed amount. While you can generate any number of codes, regular fees are associated with the final discounted amount.

3) Banner Templates; Banner Templates are a great way for you to have all of your advertiser’s banner look the same or give them an even easier method to build their banners. There are several built-in banner templates but you can also create your own.

4) System Uptime monitoring; In an effort to make our performance more transparent, the Dashboard section now displays Shiny Ads’ up-time in the last 30 days (currently at 99.87%).

5) Page Monitoring; Along with Google Analytics, we now support your own ComScore, Omniture SiteCatalyst, Quantcast, and Audience Sciences analytics monitoring codes on the Advertise pages.

6) Internal ad server statistics; If you are running of of our internal ad server, the Dashboard section will now list impression/click statistics per advertiser for the specified period.

Also, we are hiring a experienced sales person to lead our web publisher acquisition efforts. This person will be part of the executive team and be a key person in our funding process. If you of anyone, please send them our way.

And finally, one “small” change; we are finally out of BETA status. Thanks to all of those who gave us feedback and worked with us to handle defects. Although we are out of beta, please keep your feedback coming to support@shinyads.com.

Today, I’m happy to announce that we are opening up Shiny Ads to all publishers. Our registration form is now automated and requires no approval by us.

In essence, we are in an “Open Beta” as we finish out some of the remaining pieces of large functionality that we want to bring out before we officially launch. Over the next few months, we will continue to expand the functionality to make it easier for publishers to generate revenue and for their advertisers to purchases ads.

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