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

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.

A recent IAB commissioned survey suggests that 55% of the top 300 brand marketing executives will be spending less than $50,000 this year on mobile advertising. And 77% of those surveyed say that there will be a focus on mobile display advertising, among other mobile strategies. Read the full article on MediaPost.com.

Dan Frommer, contributing editor at Business Insider, documents the 10 advertising terms you’ll be hearing for years to come. “If you work anywhere near online advertising, you’re going to be hearing many of these terms for a long time. So now’s a good time to get a handle on them.”

This week was a big week for our Founder/CEO, Roy Pereira, and VP of Business Development + Sales, Zunaid Khan. They were both asked to join the XConnectTO crew in the studio to discuss being a Canadian entrepreneur.

In case you missed it the video is below and you can find the blog post at xconnectto.com.

Roy and Zunaid were also interviewed for two separate articles with the Toronto Star and Toronto Standard.

Roy spoke with John Spear of the Toronto Star about how Angels play a crucial role in funding start-up companies. And Zunaid spoke to Toronto Standard’s Navneet Alang, bringing insight to the question, “Is Toronto Technophobic?” If you have a moment, check them out!