Shiny Ads Goes Self-Serve for Premium Digital Ad Buyers
By Michael Carney
On September 6, 2012
Sales and management of premium online advertising are typically a manpower intensive process for all parties involved. Hoping to alleviate this, the recent trend has been toward adding automation anywhere possible.
Ad-tech startup Shiny Ads has specialized in delivering sell-side automation solutions to publishers enabling them to more efficiently sell premium ads to small, unsophisticated ad buyers that otherwise were not economically viable. Today, the company announced a new platform called Self-Serve for Professional Advertisers, which targets larger and more sophisticated advertisers and agencies.
“Many mid-sized ad agencies – and many medium-to-large advertisers – spend a huge amount of their and the publisher’s time simply placing and managing their premium ad buys,” says Shiny Ads founder and CEO Roy Pereira. “These people know the advertising industry and require very little handholding.”
Self-Serve for Professional Advertisers is an HTML5 Web interface that automates the premium advertising process and lets buyers self-manage every step from insertion orders to creative and payments. The result is increased order volumes, while reducing order time, errors, and direct sales requirement. Publishers are then freed to focus the time and efforts of their sales teams larger, higher-value clients.
Shiny Ads’ customers are large publishers like CBS, Automobile Magazine, AdWeek, AskMen, and ZDNet, which deploy its service to automate premium digital ad placement across their Web properties. With today’s product release, the company is helping these publishers offer automation further up the digital ad sales spectrum to a savvier and higher spending crowd.
The dashboard within new platform is more powerful, offering advertisers a shopping cart, product search, complete order management, creative upload capability for line items in each insertion order, and payment via wire transfer or credit card. Despite the automation, publishers retain control over platform access, campaign pricing and credit terms, and ultimately approval of all content (should they wish to exercise it).
Recently, Shiny Ads’ business development team has been in partnership-signing overdrive. At the beginning of August, the company signed a partnership with PubMatic to join its online publisher marketplace, giving it access to many of the world’s largest online publishers including Hearst Corporation, MSNBC, Martha Stewart, and WebMD. Two weeks later, it announced partnerships with publisher Gumtree and agency Unanimis to enter the UK market.
Belying its relative size, the two-year-old Toronto-based startup has only raised a total of $1.1 million to date from York Angel Group and Maple Leaf Angels.
The big hurdle in premium digital advertising is moving dollars from offline to online budgets. For the industry as a whole to make this transition successfully, it’s critical that the advertising process be as straightforward, efficient, and transparent as possible. Shiny Ads offers publishers the self-serve automation tools to increase revenue through supporting both small, unsophisticated advertisers and now larger, more savvier crowd.
[Image source Karen LIzzie, Flickr]
Michael Carney has spent his career exploring the world of early stage technology as an investor and entrepreneur and has participated in building companies in multiple countries within North and South America and Asia. Ultimately, he is an enthusiast of all things shiny and electronic and is inspired by those who build businesses and regularly tackle difficult problems. You can follow Michael on Twitter @mcarney.
