Viral Ad Network

The Viral Ad Network is recruiting a:

Publisher Recruitment Hero

You’ve spent some time studying and have become really good at / passionate about / engaged with a specialist skill. It might be that you’re:
- Highly numerate and analytical
- Great at selling stuff, love talking to people
- Methodical, organised, rigorous

How about getting paid to apply your skill(s) working for an interesting, creative, smart, well-run media company that will improve you as a professional without requiring you to wear a suit?

Tasks will be based around the following areas of responsibility:
- Researching and recruiting publishers and bloggers from key verticals to sign up to the Viral Ad Network
- Categorising publisher inventory to aid campaign planning and pitching processes
- Expanding VAN’s profile across key social media platforms – tweet, blog, get involved…
- Maintain and grow VAN’s publisher community.
- Ensuring VAN publisher inventory meets campaign targets

What you’re like
You’re probably not well-rounded (because it’s hard to be exceptional at everything). However, no matter how remarkable your talent, you will definitely need:
- A good degree. Everybody here has proven themselves academically or in the workplace. Being a graduate, you haven’t had a proper job yet so you’ll need the degree.
- A genuine desire to get stuck into the world of work, do something, make good stuff, take responsibility.
- A passion for all things digital and social. You should already be active on social media spaces, and writing a blog would be a bonus!
- An exceptional talent. We’ve got a great team in place but we’re always on the lookout for more match-winners.

Interested? Feel free to read more, but to apply mail Ally with a covering letter outlining why you think you are suitable for the position and where your strengths lie along with a 2 page CV.

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:

Great world cup ad from Carlsberg and Ignite London. Good script and some cracking cameos – quality stuff… and I’m a scot!

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.

You can tell when an ad has really hit the bigtime when the UG spoofs start coming in. Here’s one for my fave ad from the past couple of months – Old Spice’s ‘The man your man could smell like’.

You’ve probably already seen the original, but it’s worth another look:

And now the positively fantastic reworking:

In the words of one of the comments by AveryHayes ‘ THIS KID WINS THE ENTIRE INTERNET.’
That is all.

Our dev team will be rolling out some updates to our systems this afternoon.

This will mean you are unable to log in to your dashboard, but don’t worry – ads will keep running as normal throughout the update, and publishers will be paid as normal.

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 ; – )

Following Darren’s post on Rubber Republic’s blog entitled ‘RIP Internet meme’ , I thought I’d post this new Downfall parody where ‘Hitler reacts to the Hitler parodies being removed from YouTube’.

I hate cats!

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!

——————-

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!