Shiny Ads (www.shinyads.com) has just announced the launch of their audience targeting platform; Roy Pereira has kindly agreed to give us more insights into this breakthrough product that helps publishers make the most of of their ad inventory.
Otilia Otlacan: First of all, congratulations on the launch of the Shiny Ads Audience Targeting platform! What can you tell us about the drivers behind this launch, what has made you look into a self-serve audience targeting solution in addition to your existing display platform?
Roy Pereira: Our Shiny Ads self-serve advertising platform has always allowed online publishers to take smaller ad buys for their ad products. We’ve allowed those publishers a large degree of customization for those ad products including setting their own price, pricing model, and targeting options.
Some of our online publishers have registration-only sites where they collect at least the user’s email address and perhaps their gender, age and name. To enable these online publishers to leverage that data, without privacy issues, and offer more targeting options to their advertisers, we’ve introduced Shiny Ads Audience Targeting.
We’ve also had several of our publishers who run social network want a more complete “Social Ads” platform that is similar to other larger social networks. Shiny Ads Audience Targeting gives them that product as a black box without them having to tie separate multi-vendor products together.
Otilia Otlacan: Is the new new Shiny Ads Audience Targeting solution cookie based?
Roy Pereira: Cookies are used for frequency capping ads as well as to cache user information. Unlike an ad network based solution, Shiny Ads Audience Targeting only operates directly on a publisher’s site(s) and does not aggregate across a multi-publisher network. Thus, the user’s data (and cookies) never leave that one publisher’s control.
Otilia Otlacan: Audience targeting is usually tightly linked to certain privacy issues, particularly in the EU legislation. What are the implications of this new addition to the Shiny Ads platform for your EU-based publishers?
Roy Pereira: Shiny Ads Audience Targeting is able to obtain user data either from the publisher itself (if it has it) or deduce it from several sources, including 3rd-party data marketplaces. We work with our publishers to ensure that they have the right to use the data they have on their users to ensure that it meets privacy laws in the countries they are based in. If the user data is sourced by our system, then our license agreement with the data marketplaces provides sufficient privacy coverage. No PII data is stored on our systems.
Otilia Otlacan: One of Shiny Ads’ key features is the straightforward integration with mainstream ad servers used by publishers. Will this still be the case?
Roy Pereira: You are correct that our core product, Shiny Ads Self-Serve Advertising Platform, is unique in that it directly integrates with 7 of the top ad servers. This has a lot of benefits including removing the burden of adding JavaScript ad tags and having to reserve inventory.
To allow for the real-time user-acquisition nature of Shiny Ads Audience Targeting, we’ve had to inject our own optimizing server in the flow. This allows our solution to obtain the user data (from which ever source), and optimize the ads available based on that viewer’s information. The prediction engine uses historical performance data for similar users to create a list of the most likely interesting ads and does so in real-time. This creates a much higher conversation rate for the ad campaign which completes the CPC campaign quicker and generate more revenue for the publisher as more ad buys are completed in less time.
Otilia Otlacan: The online advertising space is changing at great speed – what’s on the roadmap for Shiny Ads in the near future?
Roy Pereira: Our mantra in the Shiny Ads office is sell-side automation for premium inventory. We are always looking at how we can increase revenues and profit margins for premium publishers. We will be expanding our programmatic buying abilities as well as distribution sources. The first brings in more deals to the publisher’s ad products directly using our existing and future APIs and ordering interface, of which we already support three; smaller advertiser, smaller agency, and inside sales. The second allows the purchased ads to be directly integrated into more destinations such as ad servers.
About Roy Pereira, Founder & CEO Shiny Ads
Roy has over 15 years of experience in technology companies and has been involved in 5 startups with his first in 1992, which focused on Internet and Email software. He has been a marketing executive at both medium-sized public corporations and VC-funded startups. He has a highly technical background with several patents and Internet standards to his name.
Follow Roy Pereira on Twitter at http://twitter.com/roymap and on LinkedIn at http://linkedin.com/in/roypereira.
More about Shiny Ads: see ShinyAds.com or check out the demo at vimeo.com/shinyads/intro.
