Understanding ad placements key concepts is crucial to understanding the blogs that will be posted here. This blog will be dedicated to explaining player, concepts and obstacles to overcome for successful presentation of ad on a rich media client.

Key players,

Publishers – organizations that hold assets on which and ad can be displayed, such as web sites, toolbars, game providers or video content providers.

Advertisers – company’s who advertise their products on the web, or represents such clients.

AdNetworks – provide a market place were an advertiser can place his ad and reach multiple publishers and the other way around. Multiple advertiser results in the better coverage and a bidding war on the publisher assets, many publishers allow better targeting higher effectiveness of the ad campaign. So the bigger the market place is the higher the benefit is for all the players.

Concepts :

Assets – a place on which an ad can be presented.

Coverage – the percentage the AdNetwork will successfully return an ad to the certain publisher per geo location of the client and demographic consideration of the asset. There are several ad networks that hold inventory just for certain regions like the USA or Europe. If you are a publisher and have users from all over the world you might be forced to work with several AdNetworks to improve your coverage and better monetize your asset.

Impression –the presentation of an ad on the client side.

Click – click on the ad presented, result in redirecting to the advertiser site.

CTR – Click-through rate is a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. Representing the ratio between the number of ad presented (impressions) and number of clicks.

Acquisition – an impression that resulted in a user actually registering or buying the advertised service.

CPA – Cost Per Action\ Acquisition a contract in which the advertiser pays for each specified action(perches, registration…)

CPC – Cost per click is the amount of money an advertiser pay per click on the ad.

eCPM – the value paid to the publisher per 1000 impressions. Actually all ad networks present earnings in their reports as eCPM values, even if payment resulted from CPA or CPC deals.

Obstacles to overcome:

• Flash and SilverLight clients used to display rich madia (movies and games) do not integrate with the format an ad is returned by the AdNetworks (iFram or JavaScript).

• When the game is developed or a movie filmed it is not designed for ad int0egration. To present the ad you have to find a location and a time on which to place an ad, and of course some code is required for the actual presentation. Last I heard there is no code integrated in avi or divx files and the requested add must fit the location found on the asset without interfering with the actual content presented on the client.

• Hopping – to retrieve an ad the client navigates to an AdNetwork server if there is no coverage he must navigate to the next AdNetwork. Navigation loss stands at about 5%-10%, and you have to develop a complicated to execute all of these hops.

There are two great blog posts that I urge you to read, they perfectly explain the process of placing an ad on an asset.

http://www.mikeonads.com/2007/05/01/the-ad-exchange-model-part-i/

http://www.mikeonads.com/2007/05/02/the-ad-exchange-model-part-ii/

A few days ago Nir (our CTO) , who always think we are very bored and have nothing to do, told us “Guy’s we find so much help in the open code sources on the internet I feel like we are abusing the development community, I think it is time to return some of our debt back to the community. Will you be interested in writing to TicTacTi Blog?” and then he added “the only time I seem to get to writing a post is in the evenings at home”. Surprisingly Ziv and I said we will be glad to write to the blog, especially since it is not a marketing oriented blog! We decided it will be a technical oriented blog that will provide a window to our life at a young, innovating ,cutting edge fun to work in startup(oops it came out marking oriented).

At any case Nir was right, it is about 00:30 AM my wife just woke from her third dream, and ask if I’m still thinking about what to write in the blog or actually started writing the blog. I tell you guys, writing a blog is not an easy task.

At our first “editorial staff meeting“ near the coffee machine (even our “staff meetings” are agile orientated), we decided on the content of our blog: our personal life and events will not be part of the blog that is why we have Facebook accounts... we will be writing on the life in a startup from the developer’s point of view, design consideration for scalable web application, how to develop light but smart clients, coding examples for the more interesting challenges we encountered, and our patented pending solution NO actually we can’t write about that, it will be like giving our edge to the competitor!

Let me introduce the our blog team members:

Ziv Rosenzweig – blogging on: Flash clients, Flexes, Silverlight, WPF, C#, Web application, .Net in general, JavaScript, HTML and Cell Phones gadgets.

Guy Rafalovich – blogging on : IT Issues, Design and development of OLTP and DWH Systems, Operation of web applications, clouds and general life in a startup.

Nir Hargsury – on : how to build a startup and whatever he like he is the CTO after all.