Viral Ad Network

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.

Just wanted to point a bit of a nod towards our very own, brand spankingly new Viral brand chart:

http://www.nma.co.uk/resources/viral-brand-chart

We were assigned by the lovely people at New Media Age to help them report on the brand-funded virals that are taking the net by storm. The chart is updated weekly and features exclusively on the NMA site. It is also the first of its kind to report on UK specific trends, not that we’re ones to brag!

Our chart acknowledges important viral indicators on top of basic views. This includes activity in social areas like Facebook and Twitter to help understand the extent of a campaign’s effect on web communities. We aim to maintain this as a cutting edge indicator of what is trending online, as well as a useful tool for those interested in social media.

To accompany the branded chart and to make best use of the reporting system, we have also launched a weekly chart for user-generated content, to help understand current trends and favourites across the wider internet. If you’re a fan of acronymys and abbreviations, this could be classed as VAN’s chart on NMA to report on UK UCG on the interweb, OMG! See this here:

http://www.nma.co.uk/resources/viral-ugc-chart

Let us know if you would like any more info. Everyone else, please enjoy responsibly!

When I first started dabbling in internet advertising (as a publisher, circa 1997), per-impression advertising was the norm. All displays were measured in CPM (Cost Per Mille – the price per 1,000 displays).

There was, however, some very flawed reasoning behind the assumption that that was a reasonable thing to pay by – for an advertiser, the concept of display CPM assumes that every thousand displays of an ad will bring you the same income.

Of course this is not true – showing an ad to 1,000 teenagers will get you a different response from showing your ad to 1,000 parents for example (which of those is better depends on what you are selling).

Less obvious differences exist as well – people are more likely to splurge on large items just after pay-day than half way through the month, and they are more likely to take anti-drinking advertisements seriously on a sunday morning.

Looking beyond the users that view the ads, the internet has changed a lot since the ninties. XHR became widespread at the change of the millenium, allowing “AJAX” websites where the browser doesn’t have to load a new page every time the user did something. Suddenly an entire visit to a website could be done on a single page, and the meaning of “display” got more blurred.

The Viral Ad Network works on a different level – publishers are paid (and advertisers pay) for some kind of interaction with the ad – which may be a video starting playing, a video ending, a clickthrough to a different site, a player reaching the second level in a game, or just about anything. This metric is more closely linked to the value a publisher brings to the advertiser – but there are still variations in how much each viewer is worth to the advertiser.

These differences are carried through in the price that’s actually paid for a viewer – and these prices vary with supply and demand.

Essentially, the more demand advertisers have for viewers on specific sites / from specific countries, the higher the price per viewer will be. Likewise, the more supply there is of similar sites, the lower the price per viewer will be.

The job of our syndication system is to create a market where these prices change efficiently with supply and demand – so publishers get paid as much as they should be, and so advertisers aren’t paying more than they should. We spend a lot of time doing mathematical modeling of how our software works to ensure it fills this role correctly, and we’re proud of the level to which it works.

We have worked on many viral campaigns in the past, helping the creators of digital content get their viral videos and games amplified and seen by millions.

The proposition of the Viral Ad Network is a pretty simple one. We get your viral content, make it compatible with our network, then target it to the most relevant viewers in our audience for their enjoyment and consumption. We then pay our publishers for each time an engagement is made by a user on their site.

Below is a little tale of a campaign we worked on with our friends Cosmic Station & Associates to help launch the video assets that accompanied a wider PR campaign for the launch of the LG Crystal Mobile last year.

The presentation exemplifies how VAN works to launch, execute and report on your campaign and the type of results that can be achieved from a potent mix of good content and effective distribution.

Take a look, add a flake and pass around to your pals who have ace content. We’ll help give it an audience:

I’m pleased to announce our newest round of updates to the Viral Ad Network:

Ad Targeting

After the success of our previous updates to our ad targeting,  we’re now analysing an extra layer of data in the same manner to target ads better, and increase click-through rates.

Ads targeting specific countries or niches will now be compared with the performance of other ads in those specific target audiences, helping to make the most out of every viewer our publishers get.

Publisher Dashboards

By default, your dashboards will now show you your total earnings in the past 14 days. This makes it easier to glance at your dashboard and immediately estimate your current daily earnings from your site.

To show all earnings since your last payment (the previous setting)  simply select “Since Last Payment” in the Date Range dropdown.

Publisher Offers

We’ve streamlined our system for offering specific ads to publishers. This means that in some situations you may now start to receive automated emails letting you know when there is a new offer – and letting you know when the offer ends.

In addition – some publishers will now be given the option of running offers alongside other ads, all without having to modify the embed code on your site. This means that you can make the most of the efficiency of our automated targeting system while running offers outside of our standard syndicated units.

Tim Wintle

Disappointed to have missed Match of the Day on Sunday evening, I thought I’d give the Superbowl a try to quench my thirst for football.

I thought I quite enjoyed American football; it is violent and exciting enough to keep my attention! However, I was soon fed up with the stop and start nature of the show. I think my mistake was watching it on the BBC where most of the program was pundits explaining the basics of the game and desperately trying to fill the time.

In the US, these gaps would have been ad breaks. The Superbowl is famous for its ads, so maybe this was what I was missing! With CBS charging about $2,700,000 for a 30 second ad, I was expecting the ads to be pretty high quality. Here’s a couple of my favourites…

$2.7m is a lot of money for an ad space. However, the Superbowl has an estimated 100 million viewers, so it works out at $0.03 a viewer – Pretty good value?

Perhaps on the surface, but are these viewers all engaging with the content? These viewers could be making tea, paying the pizza delivery guy, or if they are female, completely disengaged by the huge number of male-orientated ads!

To counter this drain of U.S. ad spend, here at the Viral Ad Network we are running a special offer. For February only, we are doing a deal on U.S. targeted campaigns. We’re giving 2500 away views for free when you spend $999 on 5000 views through the network.

Check out our offer here

We’ve developed up some quick tips and models to help PR agencies guarantee maximum viral views / buzz around your campaigns across blogs and social internet, using our Viral Ad Network (VAN).

Check out our quick tips here below:

Using the Viral Ad Network, we can guarantee awareness and views of your digital PR campaign content across our network of 100’s of blogs at the click of the button – with you paying on a simple “cost per engagement” basis, meaning full transparency to you and your client – all recorded in a live results dashboard online.

Check out our quick viral planning tool, so you can plan your viral / social media campaign and get a sense of what you can achieve with your budget!

Of otherwise, drop our team a quick note!  info@viraladnetwork.net

Great campaign to start the week off…

(by Del Campo, Nazca Saatchi and Saatchi via Adverblog)