Viral Ad Network

We pushed a bunch of new features out yesterday, including:

1. More compact, faster, ads (file size for all our ads has been reduced noticeably, which should make them display faster on publisher sites)
2. Language specific targeting. Previously, users have seen ads based purely on their location. Now, ads may be targeted based on the user’s preferred language. For example, a French language ad may now be targeted at French speakers in Canada, in addition to users located in France.
3. Extra precision for targeting options – from now, certain ads may only target individual Operating Systems and devices, while this feature is in test, this may include users across 20 different operating systems.

It’s the WORLD CUP – Hooray! But you’re stuck in the office and itching to see some football action. Spare a thought for DudeCorp:

COME ON ENGLAND!

http://dudecorp.com

I’ve just put the finishing touches to a new tutorial for advertisers

making a basic flash video ad in actionscript 3.

This tutorial includes:

1. Calling the Viral Ad Network’s tracking from actionscript
2. Embedding an image inside flash
3. Inserting a basic video into flash

At the Viral Ad Network we love a good read! Our book shelves are laden with the best writings from the worlds of development, advertising, design, business and more. Some people like to systematically read through a book, one at a time. I prefer to read a few on the go and dip in and out. Here are a couple of books I’m reading at the moment:

1. The Best Software Writing I by Joel Spolsky
2. The Smashing Book by Sven Lennartz and Vitaly Friedman
3. Designing The Moment – web interface design concepts in action by Robert Hoekman, Jr.
4. Ogilvy On Advertising by David Ogilvy
5. Attention And Interest Factors In Advertising by Harold J Rudolph
6. Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan

Let us know if you have any reading recommendations – leave a reply below, or send us a tweet.

You can find out more on interesting reading at the Rubber Republic Book Club or even sign up for the Rubber Library.

Today the Viral Ad Network salutes the humble Panda. Eating bamboo and providing virality in a sneeze!

“But where is this young panda cub now?” I hear you ask. Why, residing in our office driving Andy’s Lego trucks of course.

New Media Age is the UK’s leading weekly interactive media publication, so the perfect partner for the Viral Ad Network to power it’s viral brand and user generated content charts. Each week the chart is updated with the latest and most shared Brand and UGC videos in the UK.

This week’s charts have been dominated by the upcoming football world cup in South Africa and Britain’s Got Talent on ITV1. At the top of the brand chart is Nike’s World Cup 2010 campaign including a bearded Wayne Rooney! Also making the cut, but not the final Brazil 23 man squad, is Ronaldinho. Watch the ad below:

Sitting at the top of the UGC chart is a remix of Eastender Phil Mitchell’s infamous punch. The scene where Phil Mitchell punches Ben is beautifully crafted to the backdrop of Lethal Bizzle’s “Pow! (Forward)”. Watch the video below:

Check out the NMA Viral Brand Chart here

Check out the NMA Viral UGC Chart here

Everybody likes to think their viral creatives are going to go viral without any kind of push – but here’s the bottom line:

Summary:

How much would you enjoy reporting to your client to tell them their average cost per view was £20? (even if you don’t phrase it like that, they will be calculating it).

Including a bought spend reduces their (and your) risk – in very worst case above you’d be entering that meeting reporting an average cost per view of around 1/40th of that price – that’s 40 times more ROI for them, and a more economically viable campaign.

What’s missing from the above?

Quite a bit – for a start, the more that your content is seen, the more likely it is to get organic views – so a bought media buy makes it far less likely that you’ll be hitting anywhere close to the worst case. For simplicity I’ve left this at the most basic calculation I could.

(Disclaimer: these numbers are estimated and may not necessarily reflect real-life results, which will depend on individual campaigns)

Below is a little presentation we have put together to exemplify our prowess in the football sector and how we are able to take your footie related ads to a footie loving audience. Ahem, this happens to be a coincidence that we’re so close to the World Cup; a stroke of luck if you will…

Please take a look, and let me know if you have any questions:

If you are an advertiser you will probably have noticed that we completely re-built our campaign dashboards as part of our most recent updates.

As part of this push, we wanted an efficient way to insert basic Bullet charts into the dashboards.

These are simple charts to show how far a value has progressed towards it’s target as such [*]:

It sounds like a simple requirement, but there were many potential ways to generate them, and our dashboards have to be highly optimised to display quickly.

Implementation:

Here are the options I considered but ruled out:

• svg … but Internet Explorer doesn’t have support for svg.
• canvas (i.e. painting it client-side in javascript) … but Internet Explorer doesn’t have support for the canvas element.
• generate image server-side … requires an extra http request per chart, and delays load time.

This left me with two remaining options

• css / javascript / DOM manipulation …
• creating a flash / as3 movie …

I implemented both methods, but it very quickly became apparent that the javascript/css method was going to have more cross-browser issues than it was worth and be painful to test for bugs. We already require flash support on most dashboards, so I made a small flash movie.

Download (AS3 source, Binary .swf and example page):

BulletChart.swf comes in at around 1,300 bytes and should be cached by the user’s browser for further use – inserting the flashvars server-side allows you to cut down on http requests and compresses well if you have many charts on a page. It’s been thoroughly tested on Flash Player 10 and works on most versions of flash player 9.

viraladnetwork-bulletchart-1.0.tar.gz

License:

Our bulletchart is licensed under a BSD license, which allows you to use and modify it for commercial and non-commercial uses.

To Use:

Copy the .swf to your site and embed it as normal – you can use the following flashvars to configure the chart:

bartarget, barvalue, leftcolor, rightcolor, barcolor, targetcolor

To Compile from source (Linux/OSX/BSD):

Compilation requires the flex mxmlc compiler (which requires java). I believe this is the compiler used by flex builder etc, but windows users will have to play around.

It does not require the flash IDE.

# extract the archive
tar -xf viraladnetwork-bulletchart-1.0.tar.gz
# enter the new directory
cd bulletchart
# Modify the path to your flex compiler in the makefile
nano Makefile
# build the .swf
make

I hope people find this code useful while we’re waiting for the Internet Explorer team to release SVG support (SVG is expected in IE9 ).

Tim

[*] Most bullet charts show scale markers to display the current value on the chart itself, however we kept ours as clean as possible, and to leave the text in HTML for accessibility.