Alfred Ruth So, it’s been almost a year since we officially incorporated Videoplaza. We launched an embryo of our product in March when we served our first overlay ad ever on Kanal5.se. In July we rolled out our take on the pre/midroll when we launched our interactive iRoll ad format.
But now it’s really time to open your eyes to the backend of Videoplaza, our Campaign Manager.
Pretty early on in the development of this company we figured out that there’s a lot to be done in the area of adserving and usability. To be honest, we decided not to look too much on other interfaces when building our own simply because most of them lack good ideas to borrow.
So instead of copying the spawns of 10 years of patchwork and legacy code, we decided to use our own expertise to build something new from the ground up.
There was only one problem, we didn’t really have any expertise.
So we spent half a year doing all the traffic of our product ourselves. We spent hours on the phone with the sales guys, meddled with the creative agencies, took all the blame when things went wrong and finally we had a pretty good idea of what it is like to work as a traffic.
Then we started to build the interface we would like to work with if we we’re to keep up our traffic consultancy business (which we have no intentions of doing).
In August we rolled out the first private alpha, in October we decided to let the first real user’s in relabeling it to beta, and today I’m proud to show you some screenshots along with a few words about our ideas behind the new interface (it’s still beta though).
The dashboard:
The dashboard is the first thing you see when you log on to Videoplaza Monetizer. The idea behind it is to give you a quick look at the speed of things and a confirmation that everything is up and running.
In the top left corner you have your site’s speedometer. Since it’s all Ajax the numbers are updated in real time (or every third second) and this of course relies heavily and the magic of our backend. (Ask around, how many adservers really have real time access to live data?)
To the right of the speedometer you get the speed of the different formats that we serve (prerolls, midrolls and overlays).
Below the graph (that gives you an idea of how your site has performed during the recent past) you also get a quick overview of the booking status of your site. This is a part of the system that we aren’t quite done with yet, but the idea is that you as a traffic immediately should be able to tell if the site is overbooked. Since we use color coding it’s kind of easy to tell.
The campaign overview:
On the campaign overview page you can see all the current, upcoming and recent campaigns of your site. Active campaigns are shown in green, while inactive campaigns are gray. If there are any problems with the campaign it turns yellow for smaller problems or red if something is really bad.
As with the Opel campaign from the screenshot that has been manually stopped (which is done by clicking the big red panic button — we have been getting a lot of great feedback on that one).
This page is powered by Ajax and JQuery which can be hard to tell from a screenshot. JQuery allows us to dynamically open up campaigns with a smooth animation to dive into the details. In the screenshot I have opened up the Arla campaign the get more details on it. Also, all editing is done right in place. Just doubleclick a value that you want to alter, and you can change it right in place. (Forget the time consuming clicking back and forth between edit pages…)
The progress bars give you an idea of how much is left of the campaign and also, if it’s running behind schedule (which is the case with the Volvo campaign in the screenshot).
That’s really all I have for you today, but don’t hesitate to leave a comment or drop me a line with your feedback. We love to know what you think!
Do you have anything to add?