Viral Ad Network

So last night I headed down to @Irisnation’s Borough Office for their #leadersdebate beer n’pizza meet-up.

It was awesome to meet-up with @AlbinoRiotMan (one of the brains behind the Lib Dem’s Labservative campaign) and a v.nice and clever guy from Albion who made the slap-tasic game Slap-o-meter

Check the live slapping during the debate below (apparently they got over 1 million slaps during the debate) and the Lib Dem’s genius Labservative campaign character mash-ups ; – )

UPDATE: #KittenCamp has been re-scheduled from Tuesday 27th April to a new date of Tuesday 11th May.  Apologies for any inconvenience for this change of date, but something bizarre happened to the venue at the weekend meaning that it’s been temporarily closed ; – (

Anyway get 6.30pm 11th of May in your diary for some wholesome #KittenCamp action, and we’ll see you then!

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So we’re pleased to announce that #KittenCamp has found a new Soho home for our monthly meme meetups. And that home is Barrio Central – an uber-cool and new bar on Poland Street, conveniently (for us) located around the corner from our office.

The lovely people at Barrio have given us their indoor lounge garden area for the evening (complete with fake grass and flowers), so we can quite literally camp out and chat meme’s over the camp-fire.

We’ve also finalised the format for the evening:
- First up we’ll be doing a show and tell of the top 10 memes of the month (please share any ideas via #KittenCamp
- We’ll then doing some chatting and drinking – with (*some*) free beers provided
- And finally, we’ve got some live music going on from an unnamed (but no doubt v.cool) band to get toes tapping

#kittencamp = memes + music + beer

So come along + spread the good kitten word on ze Twitter. Thank you ; – )

Next Kitten camp (London) details:
Date: Tuesday 11th May
Time: 6.30 onwards
Twitter: #KittenCamp
Venue: Barrio Central, 6 Poland Street, Soho, London, W1F 8PS

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!

Kitten camp is a monthly meet up to drink beers and chat about the latest memes and social media shizzle organised by the nice people from Rubber Republic and the Viral Ad Network (us!)

Come along if you work / study social media, advertising, the interwebs or you’re a YouTube junky.

Don’t come along if you’re a kitten (or talking cat).

Next Kitten camp (London) details

Date: Tuesday 27th April
Time: 6.30 onwards
Venue: John Snow

**FREE BEER FOR THE FIRST 25 KITTEN CAMPERS**

Twitter: #KittenCamp

Kittens anonymous

Two talking cats:

Talking cat, translation

Talking cat

Gavin Strange a.k.a. Jam Factory, designer extraordinaire who worked with us to create our Viral Ad Network logo is featured in this months Digital Artist magazine.

He is interviewed about his role at Aardman Animations, his freelance work as Jam Factory (including his vinyl toy Droplets) and how he started his own design collective.

6 pages of goodness, and he even managed to get a nice big print of the VAN logo in the mix!

Nice one Gav!

You may have noticed that we had an unscheduled outage last night between 17:30 GMT and 23:00 GMT last night. This problem has now been resolved and we are back to normal operation.

It seems problem was caused by the power supply leading to the upstream fibre links to our primary server location.

Unfortunately, although we have secondary servers in a different location ready to take over in such a situation, our dns servers were taken off-line by the same fault, effectively preventing us from immediately switching over services.

Clearly this was a very unusual occurence, but we are looking into ways to avoid this causing such problems in the future.

Whoooah!  Team VAN are finally back from a v.fun trip to the SXSW festival in Austin + a mini (VAN) tour of the states.
SXSW was a fully inspirational experience – full of the weird + wonderful + generally futuristic.
Possibly the most interesting thing I saw came from the Dorkbot session – where Bre Pettis demo-ed his latest invention is the “Makerbot“, a 3-D printing device that allows you to literally print stuff.  That’s right – you draw it, it prints it.  For example, Bre told a story about how a guy was due to referee at his son’s football match and realised he didn’t have a whistle – so, using Makerbot he printed out a whistle in a couple of hours.  That’s right – he actually printed out a working whistle.  Fricking awesome.

I was also pretty blown away by Arcattack’s mind-bending Tesla Coil musical extravaganza which was kinda like a musical electric storm.

Check out photos below – including Arcattack, Ally and his Ice Cream VAN and our super-rad VAN meme badges . . .

Ally and his Ice Cream VAN in Austin

VAN meme badges (I HEART Ceiling cat)

Arcattack’s dancing Tesla Coils @ Dorkbot

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

I like this youtube video from Henrik Leichsenring. He has used hotlinks in the play bar to give the ability to mix music (and freaky rabbit dancing!).

Bit of a frustrating lag… but nice to see people using the medium for new things!