PITTSBURGH – Wizzard Media (NYSE Amex:WZE), the world’s largest podcasting network announced the release of Alchemy 2.1 with seamless integration into the LibsynPRO/Wizzard Media Advertising Network. Now, advertising campaigns run in podcast downloads can automatically play through the Wizzard Media flash player with advanced tracking and interactive capabilities. No need to use separate systems to run ads in downloaded media and streaming media. The same ads play when downloaded in iTunes, played through mobile iTunes on the iPhone and played online through the flash based media player.
“This new system is the technical foundation of Wizzard’s strategic advertising monetization plan for its content producers for 2009 and greatly expands our opportunity to fill the advertising inventory we have available today,” said Chris Spencer, Wizzard CEO. “We plan to continue to integrate additional third party advertising networks to maximize monetization across all forms of distribution of the content we publish for our producers. With this release, we expand our offering to advertisers to include interactive ads that result in leads generated for their products. By clicking on the ad while it is run in the flash player a consumer is automatically transported to the advertiser’s website. Now, ad buyers can make one buy across streaming and downloadable media reaching consumers where they consume entertainment on their computer, on their iPods or on their iPhones.”
The Alchemy 2.1 implementation of the Wizzard Media flash player adheres to the IAB VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) standard that allows for simple plug-n-play for third party advertising system integration. The new system works with AOL’s Platform A and ADTECH and Wizzard plans to expand the capabilities to include DoubleClick and Atlas in the near future. The measuring of advertisements, consumer clickthroughs to advertiser’s web sites and audience feedback responses are all tracked using Nielsen//NetRating.
Alchemy 2.1 supports traditional pre, post and mid roll in-stream ad units and also supports overlay static and animated banners in addition to earlug ad units.
Here is what one user of the new system said about Alchemy 2.1:
“Wizzard’s ad insertion tools have been a huge benefit to us at Alaska HDTV. Having the ability to manage our ad campaigns is huge and vastly improves our chances of landing advertising deals like we did with Alaska Airlines. We’re now delivering pre-roll both in our downloadable media and via the embeddable flash player on our website. Wizzard even took it a step further giving us the option of delivering two separate pre-roll clips – one for the downloads and the other via the flash player. The complete bundle of content delivery, campaign management, a great embeddable flash player with a nice mix of distribution channels has truly enabled us to maintain direct relationships with both our advertisers and our viewers. Wizzard has delivered exactly what we’ve been looking for and has been incredibly responsive to our feedback along the way. Nobody delivers the features, value and reliability that we’re getting from Wizzard.”
An example of an active use of the new flash player system can be found at Alaska HDTV:
http://www.alaskahdtv.com/2009/kodiak-island-adventures/
About Wizzard Media (a division of Wizzard Software):
Wizzard Media is the industry’s leading podcast hosting network, with an unprecedented 1.2 billion download requests in 2008. Podcasts are a means for independent and professional content creators to publish audio and video shows for the world to enjoy over the Internet or on mp3 players, such as the Apple iPod® and the Microsoft Zune®. Podcasting is a relatively new phenomenon, but Wizzard Media collectively broadcasts millions of podcast downloads per day through media aggregators like Apple’s iTunes and Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace. For more information, please visit www.wizzard.tv. Wizzard Media is a division of Wizzard Software, a leader in speech technology development.
