Viral Ad Network

Seems like an appropriate photo right now (for the UK at least).

That’s younger me in the picture! Have a good holiday, take care, and thanks

Here at the Viral Ad Network, we’ve been trying to work out how we can get the biggest win for all our stakeholders. We’re extremely passionate about advertising and want to maximise the benefits for all involved:

• ~ We want our advertisers to get genuine engagement from a targeted, relevant audience;
• ~ We want this audience to enjoy the ads and choose to watch them;
• ~ We want our publishers to earn a fair price, and keep their sites’ popularity and appeal.

We think our cost-per-engagement (CPE) model is the most suitable method to reach the advertising parity that we strive for!

Our industry has been caught up a little in acronym tennis about the best expression for this model; we aren’t fussy about the exact term (we think CPE is ace!), as long as it means that people only pay when a user actively opts in and actually engages with the content.

CPE has obvious benefits to advertisers: they only pay for genuine interaction. People are becoming more and more used to online ads and cost per display advertising is subject to ‘Banner Blindness’ from many users. This makes a CPE ad spend more accountable as the advertiser won’t pay for people who aren’t interested in their message… But what are the benefits for everyone else?

The viewer gets a chance to decide if they want to engage with the content. Nothing is forced upon them, and as a result the ads have to be more entertaining and less of a hard sale.

As a publisher, your site’s viewers will get the choice whether they opt in to our ads. They can focus on the reason they are on your site: the content. With our ‘Fun Units’, we aim to add to the content of your site – to serve up fun and entertaining ads that will keep your site attractive to users so they will keep coming back. The virals we distribute are not a hard sell, so fit in with a wider range of sites, and aim to reward the viewer with fun and entertainment.

We also make our Fun Units show on-site games and videos; the video is played in-situ so when viewers engage with the content, they aren’t redirected away from your site. The fact that they are rewarding to your viewers also means you can approach the ad placement in your way… ‘video of the day’, ’sponsored fun’, whatever you think works best – as long as you say that it is an ad, we don’t mind!

Any questions, get in touch @ info(at)viraladnetwork(dot)net.

We love to hear what you think about the way we work!

We’re very excited about the re-branding for the new Viral Ad Network site, and want to ensure all our users are enjoying the new features we’ve been adding. You may have noticed that we have recently launched a new centralised login system. You can now login from the re-branded Viral Ad Network site:

This will then take you through to the re-branded Viral Ad Network login page. Once logged in you can view your dashboard with awesome reporting!

We hope you like this new flavour!

We will be taking dashboards off-line for important maintenance for a couple of hours today – as usual ads will continue running, and publishers will still be paid during this period.

As we fast approach christmas time with all it’s festivity and good will, spare a thought for all those hard working computers!

Don’t know if you’ve seen this floating around the ‘interweb’ today:

It was recommended by a friend via Twitter, and whilst I vaguely understand what’s going on (I only speak a small amount of Japanese…), it’s still interesting enough to pull me in and make me want to know what’s happening.

This article might explain a bit more about what’s going on. Basically, they’re advertising Softbank’s new ‘Speaker phone’ which is shaped like a dog. It’s still funny, even if the product itself gets a bit lost with all the references.

Perhaps some of Softbank’s better ‘advertising’ examples would be these:

Getting celebrities to star in commercials to sell your product is nothing new, but in this instance, putting them into unusual roles (perhaps out of their comfort zone, especially in the case of Brad Pitt), seems to work really well.

Oh, and just cause it’s you, here’s another of the ad campaign videos:

A team from MIT has won DARPA’s “networking challenge” using an age-old viral strategy.

The DARPA networking challenge – launched in aid of the 40th birthday of the internet – consisted of searching for ten red baloons placed around the USA and a single team reporting all ten of them at once to win $40K.

The challenge was designed to see how social networking could be harnessed to help “solve problems” (given the military connection it seems reasonable to assume that they’re also interested in seeing how to integrate intelligence into social graphs)

The MIT team that won performed a classic viral marketing strategy. In a multi-level marketing campaign (similar to a pyramid scheme but without guaranteed income), they gave the person who discovered each balloon half of the value ($2K) – the person who signed them up half of the remainder ($1K) – the person who signed them up half of that ($500) … etc.  The remaining money was given to charity.

By building their social graph only through recording referrers, they managed to create a fully connected social graph (which I’ve previously shown to be the most desirable form of social graph to “go viral”).

Further, the fact they were incentivising their participants managed to encourage the rapid growth of such a graph – (presumably built piece-wise from the social subgraphs of other networks) – pushing them firmly towards going viral.

We like ice cream. You only have to check out our logo to realise this. Ice cream is good. We also like social media. Social media platforms are a great way to get your ‘spreadable’ media, such as videos and games, out to those that want it.

Think of us as the ice cream producers, going out in our VAN: we take the viral content (say a video for your latest campaign/product, a bit like this), sort out the tracking for it, then we send it along to the vendors (i.e. the publishers affiliated with our Viral Ad Network). Once it’s up on their sites, they bring in revenue from the people who engage with it.

A bit more about social media, explained in plain English (read: ice cream) terms:

NB. The VAN logo and branding was lovingly designed by Gavin Strange aka. Jamfactory – what a clever old stick!

cheers swedemason on youtube… creator of clarkson beatbox

The kind people @ Brand republic thought our relaunch deserved a mention! Check it out here!

Or see the article here as it appears on Revolution magazine’s website!

Cheers then…