This is an extremely important part of VAN that looks after our bloggers and website owners; providing them with great ad campaigns that pay them well, and ultimately providing our advertisers with views for their campaigns on awesome sites.

So what’s the job like:

This is a great way to get started in the industry. You get to work on great campaigns for big clients, and you’ll pick up key skills in account management, planning, media buying and reporting. We hope you’ll stick around for a couple of years, but we’ll train you in ways that give you a great preparation to step up to your next position (whether it’s internal or external).

The role has three key responsibilities:

• • Help build our network of quality online publishers
  • Support the campaign management team with delivery of clients campaigns
  • Support the sales team with publisher input for pitching

In detail…

• • Researching and recruiting publishers and bloggers from desired categories to sign up to the network
  • Assessing and processing incoming publisher signups.
  • Categorising publisher inventory to aid campaign planning and pitching
  • Expanding VAN’s profile across key social media platforms – tweet, blog, get involved…
  • Help to grow VAN’s publisher community with relevant marketing & events.
  • Ensure VAN publisher inventory meets individual campaign targets.

What you’re like:

This is a job for people who:

• • Are comfortable with numbers, especially straightforward arithmetic.
  • Enjoy talking to people by phone and email to develop relationships.
  • Work hard (cliche, but true here). It’s a job where you need to get your tasks done to time. It can also be necessary to check campaign progress out of office hours (using online systems).
  • Have solid writing skills: we don’t have time to check your spelling etc, and we’re working with publishers who may judge us negatively if you can’t write clearly and accurately.

The type of work is fairly consistent and suits someone who is happy to do similar tasks on a daily basis. That said, the job is exciting: new opportunities come up, new relationships will be formed, we get sales wins and awesome content to seed, and campaigns need to get their views.

You will definitely need:

• • A genuine desire to get stuck into work and take responsibility.
  • A passion for online publishing. You need to be an active consumer of digital, and experience writing or running a blog would be great.
  • Previous work experience, this can be anything dealing with people or a task based role. It doesn’t have to be relevant to marketing or online, but we don’t have time to teach you the most basic professional and get-things-done skills.

Salary and progression

• • Within the role, you can progress from ‘novice’ to ‘ninja’. This would take a couple of years. A complete novice starts on £14.4k, and a ninja would get around £25k.
  • There’s healthy profit share on top for all staff (linked to company performance), and a success club (team rewards for making monthly sales target).
  • There’s a wide range of progression opportunities when it’s time to move on from this role. There may be opportunities to move up within VAN taking management responsibility for aspects of sales or operations, or moving elsewhere within the Team Rubber group. It’s also a great stepping stone into agencies or client-side marketing, giving a solid grounding in account management, media planning and buying, and campaign operations.

Interested? To apply mail ally@viraladnetwork.net 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.

The Mongol Rally is an epic 10,000 mile charity road-trip from London to Mongolia across three deserts, five mountain ranges and seemingly endless stretches of remote barren land. It’s been described by some as “the greatest adventure possible”, but as one of the least populated countries in the world and with no support crew, help lines or road signs and sometimes days of traveling without seeing another living soul, the reality of life on the road can be hard.

This is definitely not a holiday but for those with the perseverance, ingenuity and sheer good luck to make it across a third of the world’s most inhospitable terrain and over that finish line the thrill must be pretty epic!

Tempted? There are still places available in the 2012 race, check the website to find out more.

Directski.com: I’m sure we would all agree that some healthy competition keeps everyone on their toes and a bit of friendly banter between rival companies never really does any harm. Well, online ski holiday provider Directski.com are certainly testing that theory by releasing this amusing video ad in response to an alleged disagreement with their competitor, Crystal Ski, over price comparisons.

With the title ‘Crystal Ski were so annoyed about our low prices they phoned our dad’, the video shows the two owners of the company, their dad and a rather intimidating Frank Bruno, challenging their competitors to a fight to prove whose dad is hardest.

Our dad vs their dad… We know who’s cheaper… Now let’s see who’s harder.’

Now we’re waiting to see if Crystal Ski make a response video!

Here’s to Real Friends extended trailer: Scotch whisky brand, Chivas Regal have ventured into the film industry, going beyond product placement to produce movies in the hopes of reaching a more receptive mass market. They worked with Euro RSCG to commission two short films by Academy Award winning short filmmaker Joachim Back.

The films are intended to increase awareness of their brands ‘social chivalry’ with two stories about the highs and lows of modern male friendships. We’ve been seeding the  extended teaser trailer but both films; Here’s to Big Bear and Here’s to Twinkle are available to watch now, perfect for a little afternoon break!

The expanding lightbox will be displayed as a site overlay and will grab the viewer’s attention, whilst keeping them on your site (therefore no site traffic will be lost). This also means that we can host flash games or more complex video campaigns via the Fun Links on your site.

Here’s an example…

Expanded ‘Lightbox’ Unit

You can also customise your Fun Links to suit your site – another cool feature! Here are some examples of customised Leaderboard ad units…

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you have any questions about publisher security, please get in touch.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’d like to know more about how we optimise ads, feel free to get in touch.

Christmas is always a great time for retailers, and so it’s no surprise that we always see a boom in advertising spend in the final months of the year.

But increased ad spend means increased competition for ad space, both driving up prices, and allowing our ad targeting systems to make the most of publishers’ inventory.

As a result, the eCPM for many of our publishers has increased dramatically with demand recently.

In fact, the average publisher eCPM we’ve paid for UK viewers has almost tripled in the last two months. (you can see the shape of the curve in the chart below).

If you’re a Viral Ad Network publisher, the run up to Christmas is a good time to focus on your ad placement and make sure you’re making the most of the festive season.

The eCPM plotted above represents the (smoothed) weighted average eCPM paid out to publishers from the Viral Ad Network. The eCPM varies, and may go down as well as up. No guarantees of future prices are implied.

Another week, another installment of blogger tips for our VAN publishers. This week’s article “How To Write Compelling Blog Posts” comes from Debra Murphy of Masterful Marketing. Debra gives some great tips that could help publishers struggling to maintain their blogging activity.

Debra suggests some key steps to take, including developing a list of post topics before you start to post; crafting post titles that get attention; writing for scanning, not reading; using a casual and friendly tone; linking out to relevant content; eliminating unnecessary words; and staying on topic.

The full article goes into more detail – it’s definitely worth a read if you feel your blogging activity could do with a boost!

We’ve been running our first styles of content unit in invitation-only beta for a little while but until now the ads that have been shown have been limited to text or image links to our content.

With the launch of our gadget content units we can now offer you the chance to embed the entertaining, viral content you’ve come to expect from us directly into your site…and get paid for it.  And you get all the simplicity of our syndication system to boot.

What is a Gadget Content Unit?

A gadget unit can display any type of rich-media content securely in your website automatically. This content can include games, videos or any other rich-media.

Here’s an example gadget content unit:

How do I place a Content Unit?

It’s really easy to place a content unit on your page.  We’ll provide you with a custom embed code which you’ll just need to include in the relevant place on your page.  Then, our syndication system does the rest.  Your embed code will look something like the example below (please don’t copy and paste this example, though — we’ll provide you with your own code if you want a gadget ad!):

<mce:script type="text/javascript"><!-- var vaunit_unit_type=0; var vaunit_width=300; var vaunit_height=250; var vaunit_id=32; // --></mce:script><br /> <mce:script type="text/javascript" src="http://syndication1.viraladnetwork.net/getad/?style=frame" mce_src="http://syndication1.viraladnetwork.net/getad/?style=frame" ></mce:script>

We’ve been listening closely to the feedback that you’ve passed on to our team, and in response we have added functionalities and tools that will be useful to you in the future. The biggest request for inclusion in the publisher dashboards was a function that allowed you to log in and to see a breakdown of the numbers you have delivered for each viral campaign.

With this in mind, the first thing you will see when you log in is now an overview of the statistics for your account. In the top right of the page you’ll find a box that will show you (almost) live totals for the number of actions that have been tracked through the network on all “managed placements” (campaign placements you have organised direct with our network team)*.

Clicking on the link “managed placements” will take you to a page where you can get more detailed breakdowns of the actions you have provided.

Please Note that these totals will not accurately reflect actions that took place prior to the launch of the revised dashboard.

In the top half of the page you can see recent actions broken down by day – which is useful if you want to try changing the positioning of your ads to increase your revenue.

In the lower half of the page you can see a breakdown of actions by campaign, which will be especially useful if you have multiple placements running at one time.

The next most requested feature was help on using the dashboard – you can now find a help page by clicking the link marked “help” near the top of the page.

I hope that you will all find the new features useful – the rest of the development team and myself try to keep up to date with any comments passed on, so if you have any queries or requests do mention them next time you’re in contact with the team and they will be taken into consideration.

Tim Wintle

* We aim to provide you with accurate measured action counts, however the numbers displayed are estimates and may be revised. Counts are analysed to discount invalid actions.