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”

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

We have received a number of enquries about providing a self serve interface for text advertising and so today we are launching support for text ads within the Shiny Ads self serve advertising platform.  A web publisher can now select an ad zone/placement that is designated for text ads only and can also design the HTML template that will be displayed with the advertiser-supplied title, description and URL.  When an advertiser visits the “Advertise Here” self service interface, they are presented with a clean and easy interface to build their text ad, instead of the display banner builder.

Today, we made available 3 key pieces of feedback so that our publisher can make the appropriate changes to their pricing and media kits and increase their conversation rates:

• Was there enough information in the media kit?
• Was the price reasonable?
• Was the pricing options easy to understand?

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