Last night we released version 1.0 of the BuyAds.com marketplace! What started off last year as a prototype became a successful experiment, and it was time to upgrade. We have been itching to do some basic upgrades, and heard loud and clear you guys were waiting too

There’s been a few attempts at open ad marketplaces over the years, with most of them failing to meet expectations and shutting down. We humbly think we’ve got some great ideas about why they failed and where BuyAds can finally make the difference and we keep marching forward – but that involves some experimentation, and the world’s not going to change overnight.

For example, included in this release is open searching. Search is actually a really hard thing to get right. We think we got a decent baseline, but it will improve over time and we’d ask for your patience and help!

We’d love to know what you think!

Some highlights of the new changes:

All new visual styling – because sometimes you need a new coat of paint. It’s unusual to see a solid blue background, but we like it. What do you think?

Expanded education pages explaining what BuyAds is, how it works, why it’s different than ad networks, etc. Examples here and here.

Making it easier to find the right websites – search, full IAB categorization, see similar tags or categories, etc.

Improved the website “player cards”. You can now quick expand each one to make the window shopping experience faster, with quick one-click add to cart! Just click the blue “Details” button on a player card to expand it.

Completely redesign the profile pages for groups and websites. We moved the ad inventory up to the top and made it clear and quick what each website wanted to sell. We also added better categorization and metrics, with plans to add more in the near future.

Adding items to your campaign (cart) and the checkout process is drastically streamlined. You can now just “throw” things in your cart, and then configure everything at once like one big campaign. But don’t worry – you can still dig in to each items in your campaign to tweak creatives, tracking URLs, and more.

 Go on, start shopping!

isocket exists to make it easier for advertisers and publishers to do business directly with each other.

Today is a big step towards solving those problems. We’re building the world’s first true platform for true premium inventory with a major new addition to our service: programmatic direct sales via our BuyAds.com API.

Put simply:

• For publishers, this is the first time you can expose your Class 1 inventory directly into the buying tools advertisers are already using, like DSPs and media planners. That means more orders.
• For advertisers, within your existing tools you can search for transparent listings of premium publishers and their best inventory – and then click to place an executable order. That means better campaigns with much less hassle.

Psst… some quick definitions: “Class 1″ inventory is the premium ad space bought and sold directly. Advertiser and publisher agree on a specific deal, they shake hands, the campaign is guaranteed to run, etc. It’s the highest priority campaign that can run on a website. “Class 2″ is whatever leftover inventory isn’t sold directly, which is then put out in the open remnant markets (like ad networks and RTB.)

We believe any new product should have a clear reason for existing. But the ad tech industry is in love with complexity for complexity’s sake… so if you’ll indulge me on the wordiness, here’s why isocket is doing this:

Today’s Real Time Bidding is only a piece of the programmatic future.

There has been a ton of progress made in the biddable layer of ad inventory over the last few years. And as a team that’s genuinely passionate about seeing a world where buying and selling ads is easier we’ve always been thrilled about the rise of programmatic buying for remnant inventory (Real Time Bidding).

Heck, our newest teammate even spent the last few years helping build the largest RTB market behind Google. But there’s still more work to be done.

RTB and private exchanges were designed to efficiently sell remnant inventory by letting different systems talk to each other through APIs.  They do a good job at that and will continue to grow market share.

Common limitations include the fact the inventory available in RTB is by definition remnant (often the bottom of the ad server barrel), there are no guarantees around campaign spend, it’s too difficult to pick the URLs an ad will show up on (or even find out where they ran after the fact), publishers feel channel conflict and lack of control, and so on.

Private exchanges haven’t shown to be the answer in many ways either. Kurt Unkel, SVP at VivaKi Nerve Center said last month that “private exchanges create operational inefficiencies on our side, almost as messy as buying on the direct side.” Others point out that the inventory available in private exchanges is a subset of what was already available in RTB, namely Class 2 inventory, now with a higher price tag.

“We want to do direct buys, but without the manual hassle.”

Consequently, brand advertisers have typically only moved audience targeting and retargeting budgets into RTB, and good publishers have only made Class 2 inventory available in RTB and private exchanges.  The vast majority of digital display spend occurs directly between publishers and advertisers / their agencies.

Over the last year isocket started hearing from advertisers and demand side tools with a growing but clear message: “This RTB thing has been great. But there’s a whole other world we want to tackle next. Let’s improve the premium side… we want to do programmatic Class 1. We want better inventory. We want to pick the websites we run on. We want guaranteed campaigns.”

Early platform partner Rob Leathern, CEO of the DSP XA.net, has seen how direct buys and RTB can work together:

“There’s a real need for the BuyAds platform. More advertisers are asking for specific site placements and premium brand campaigns; transparency and certainty is important for our clients. Bringing programmatic Class 1 inventory into the mix can make the RTB buys better, and vice versa.”

“As a premium publisher, you are best suited to represent your own inventory.” – ESPN.com

We agree. But there is a severe lack of tools and infrastructure for publishers to represent themselves, and for advertisers to find and work directly with those publishers. In other words – there’s been a lot of infrastructure and piping laid in the remnant world, but little to none in the premium world.

isocket is changing that. The timing is right, the technology is mature enough, and most importantly the people are ready (well, most of them…)

Today we’re publically planting our flag and sharing the first info about the piping we’ve been laying the last few months.

How we’re doing it

We believe there are fundamental differences between direct premium deals and remnant ones – differences significant enough that we purpose-built our system for Class 1 inventory from the ground up.

We believe in:

• Simplicity wherever possible. Ad tech doesn’t have to equal overly complicated and ugly. Reject old notions and solve the problems that matter.  
• Humans cannot be replaced in direct sales and media planning. Relationships, context, and creativity matters. Direct sales won’t be replaced by robots. But the logistics can improve with the right technology. 
• Publisher specific inventory. It does matter what websites a premium ad runs on. You won’t find blind, obfuscated or oddly-labeled bundles here.
• All inventory is created, priced, and controlled by the publisher. This is a prerequisite to offering truly Class 1 inventory.
• Guaranteed campaigns. Advertisers and publishers both value the certainty of getting exactly what they agreed on.
• Advertisers pick exactly what they want. Both sides pick exactly what they want, and aren’t forced to take anything else.
• Complete publisher control. Publishers control what orders they accept from whom, what creatives run on their sites, etc. Part of direct sales is curating who you do business with, and that doesn’t change here.
• Display can be great for branding and more branding budgets will flow online as the friction of direct guaranteed deals become easier.

Everything should work together. Picture a network of piping connecting all the great demand platforms with all the great inventory sources and all the tools that help execute campaigns (ad servers, creative, etc.)

Just this week two ad tech giants on the advertiser side, Donovan and MediaBank, announced a merger into a new company called MediaOcean. Their mission is to “create an operating system through which any advertising agency can access any advertising technology, and orchestrate across all technologies globally.”

We agree and are working hard to help reach that world. This new platform is a part of that infrastructure, because a system like MediaOcean requires piping into 3^rd parties in order to find and buy inventory.

The platform and APIs

The word “platform” gets misused a lot, but we’re actually building one – some simple but powerful APIs that give anyone the ability to interact with the BuyAds.com infrastructure.

For example, selected partners can:

• Search our hand-curated “catalog” of premium publishers.
• Search 3^rd party, non-isocket publishers (great for marketers.)
• See what inventory is available at what prices, creatives, etc.
• Place direct orders programmatically.
• Complete the life cycle of an order, from approval through payment and metrics.

This is complemented on the supply side through our industry leading isocket.com platform – notably our awesome partnership with Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers ad server.

The end result? Piping that directly connects advertiser software with publisher ad servers.

Who should partner?

Any tool that helps marketers plan, manage, or execute campaigns can use this platform.

isocket is already working with major Demand Side Platforms and RFP management tools to bring Class 1 inventory within their client’s reach. As those partners announce their integrations we’ll highlight them on our blog.

Early BuyAds platform partner MediaMath’s departing General Manager Anthony Katsur (now at pub optimizer Maxifier) offers his perspective:

“I’ve spent 16 years on both sides of the digital media ecosystem, and one thing is clear: publishers and agencies need to embrace the capabilities that isocket is bringing to the landscape.”

“A single platform creating seamless access to premium media is inevitable. These developments are not intended to replace the direct relationship between buyer and seller, but to strengthen them by removing the overly complex logistics associated with the direct purchase of premium guaranteed buys, allowing buyers and sellers to focus on their core competencies – publishers creating great content, agencies developing ingenious marketing strategies with their clients. It’s a win-win for the entire ecosystem.”

Our early partners not only include traditional Demand Side Platforms and RFP management / media planning tools, but other great services like the recently launched startup MixRank. MixRank gives marketers intelligence about what websites their competitors are successfully running ads on. With the BuyAds.com platform, MixRank can turn that intelligent grocery list into an actionable media plan – click a button, and it’s done.

“Display advertising has been continuously getting more transparent the past few years, and isocket is at the forefront of this trend. We’re very excited about the BuyAds partnership. By combining our data intelligence with the media buying capabilities of the BuyAds platform , it’s now easier than ever for advertisers to execute successful display campaigns.” – Ilya Lichtenstein, Founder

Interested in working with us?

All isocket publishers are automatically included in this platform. If you’d like to join, please apply on www.isocket.com.

If you’d like to partner and use our API, we love to hear new ideas or explore how we can help. Send us a note at hello (at) isocket com!

Our small project continues to grow! We’ve had some great wins over the last few months and even though we tried to keep some of them quiet, the cats were sneaking out of the bag…

Please welcome our newest teammate and VP Sales, Ben Trenda!

Ben joins us from the Rubicon Project, where he was VP Marketplace. During Ben’s tenure, Rubicon built what has become one of the world’s largest RTB platforms for remnant inventory, and developed Private Marketplaces for several major publishers. Before Rubicon Ben served as VP of Global Alliances and Agency Partnerships at AOL, and held various roles in Strategic Alliances at Yahoo/Overture before that

This is how we made our offer (love Jordan’s thumbs up face)

We’re super excited to welcome Ben and even in the little time he’s been here we’ve already cranked up the velocity. Say hola to Ben at @btrenda on LinkedIn or ben [at] isocket.

Oh, and some cash too.

I’m also happy to share that isocket has received additional VC funding from a mix of great new investors and all of our existing ones! We’re growing and have lots of awesome stuff coming down the pipe (stay tuned the next few weeks).

Plus we’re expanding our small team to include some additional engineers, a designer, and opening up a NYC office. Do you or someone you know love solving massive inefficiency problems or think advertising is rad? We’d love to meet you (or give you $5,000 for the referral!)

Now we can totally afford that “spa” treatment the team has been asking for

I think it’s an appropriate time to use one of my favorite sayings: “We’re as happy as a clam” to share that Mashable, one of the leading social media and tech news sources, just opened up their self-service ad sales on isocket!

If you’re into the world of social media and you haven’t somehow heard of Mashable then you’ve probably been living under a rock that’s hidden in a barn that’s stuck in a cave in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, they’re that awesome. The great team of people at Mashable are growing and doing big things.

Want to reach 13 million tech savvy visitors? Check out the run of site ad packages on Mashable’s advertising sales page.

Their inventory includes run of site ad zones of the 728×90 leaderboard, 300×250 medium rectangle, and 160×600 wide skycraper varieties. You can also sponsor the 300×250 med rec in their RSS feed to reach half a million subscribers.

We just made some tweaks to how you place a CPM ad order when adding it to your cart, why not give it a test run with an order?

With Mashable, TechCrunch, some exciting new publishers about to be announced soon, and our other great tech/startup blogs – BuyAds.com is the best place anywhere to reach these premium targeted audiences.

More to come

Let’s face it, people love to get a deal and sometimes when you’re selling ads giving a potential advertiser a little bit of a break on your prices can quickly turn them from a window shopper into a buyer. After getting several requests from our publishers and realizing that helping facilitate these types of deals would be awesome we’ve developed a coupon code system that’s now officially open for business. If you’re one of our publishers and want to check it out all you need to do is login and go here to see what I’m talking about.

Why Coupon Codes?

I want to get one thing straight — we’re not just here to help our publishers manage their direct sales, but we’re also here to do anything we can to help them get more sales in the door. This is the reason behind us launching our advertising marketplace BuyAds.com and it’s why we put the time and effort into creating a fully-featured coupon code system. We don’t have a dedicated sales team making phone calls and putting together deals (although we have done that before), but building tools that will help our publishers sell more ads is something we’re always all about doing. Simply put, we feel like having the ability to quickly create coupon codes will only help boost sales for our publishers and that’s why we did it. It’s really that simple.

How Do Coupon Codes Work?

Using our coupon system is easy, here’s a quick look at how they work.

1. Create the Coupon Code
First a coupon code needs to be created. The coupon codes screen is found in a tab under the Inventory section. After clicking the green CREATE A COUPON CODE button the create a coupon code form will appear. This is where the different options are chosen for the coupon code that’s being created.

The coupon code options are:

Coupon Code: This is the code that will be used by the advertiser. It can be up to 50 characters long and be a mix of numbers, letters, symbols and spaces.

Website: The coupon can be used for discounts on this website. Coupons are website based, so the coupon can be used for any order that is placed on any zone on the website that’s selected.

Coupon Code Type: The coupons can expire in one of three different ways. One time Use (can only be used once), 30 Day (can be used for the next 30 days) or Ongoing (the coupon is ongoing unless it’s disabled).

Discount Value (%): The amount of discount, as a percentage, that the coupon should give the advertiser for their order.

Enabled (Yes or No): Enable or disable the coupon. An enabled coupon can be redeemed and a disabled coupon can’t.

After the coupon options are all set, click Save and the coupon will be saved and ready to use.

2. Distribute The Coupon Code
Getting the coupon code created is just the first step, next the coupon code needs to be distributed to advertisers. This can be done many different ways, but the main goal is to get the coupon code into the hands of advertisers who can use it. They could be new potential advertisers who need some extra motivation to buy or they could be current advertisers who deserve a discount for being so awesome. Either way the coupon code needs to get out to advertisers, no matter who they may be.

3. Advertiser Redeems Coupon Code During Checkout
Once an advertiser knows the coupon code they can use it during the checkout process when they’re placing their order. After entering in the coupon code the discount is applied to the order and the total price is adjusted accordingly. The advertiser gets a good deal, the publisher gets a new advertiser and everyone’s happy. Beautiful, isn’t it?

What Do You Think?

So that’s about all you need to know about our new coupon codes. It’s brand new so just like with every other new feature we launch we would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on it once you get a chance to check it out. Leave us a comment if you have some thoughts and we’ll catch up soon!

photo credit: timstvshowcase.com

Twitching with joy to announce two awesome things today: the launch of our premium ad marketplace BuyAds.com and an industry-first partnership with Google’s DoubleClick ad server!

The folks here at isocket are oddly passionate about making advertising sales suck less. Our self-serve ad sales application is thriving and has helped move the industry forward by making it super simple for advertisers to buy a direct campaign and for publishers to configure and sell their inventory (and all for 0% commissions!)

Now the next logical step is to make a “shoppable” marketplace for advertisers. Well, it’s finally here.

BuyAds.com is the easiest way to buy premium ads on the web’s best sites!

BuyAds.com (sweet domain right?) is our new premium marketplace featuring ad inventory of hundreds of the web’s best properties. You can pick and configure the ads you want, add them to your cart, checkout, and you’re done!

We’re experimenting with different ways to make it easy for advertisers. Rather than an open search box, we’ve tagged websites into verticals like Fashion, Gaming, Tech and Entertainment. We know it’s really tough for advertisers to find the websites they want to advertise on. We get calls from people searching through Google and going one by one by one for the right places to advertise. Stop!

BuyAds is a hand curated list of the best sites. And we’ve even included websites that aren’t powered by isocket. You can’t add them to your cart, but at least it helps you move in the right direction.

So what kind of sites are on BuyAds.com? Here’s a sample list:

• TechCrunch
• The Cheezburger Network (iCanHasCheezburger, failBlog, The Daily What)
• The Spartz Network (OMG Facts, Taste of Awesome, smartphOWNED)
• LOOKBOOK.nu
• What I Wore
• The Blog of Tim Ferriss
• GameZebo
• VentureLoop
• Vator.tv
• and many more…

We’re very excited about what we could do with BuyAds.com and it’s definitely the “first draft” in what we hope becomes the number one destination for premium advertising. We’d love to have you check it out and if you have any feedback for how we could improve it, we’re all ears!

Google and isocket partner to bring self-service and guaranteed ad sales to any publisher using Google’s DFP ad server!

For the last year Google and isocket have been locked in a lab cooking up a batch of awesome. Many publishers use DoubleClick’s Dart for Publishers ad server (part of which was formerly called Google Ad Manager). But unfortunately those ad servers don’t make it easy enough to do direct ad sales.

For the first time in the industry publishers on DFP can seamlessly integrate a direct sales tool into their ad server – avoiding the need to daisy chain ad servers together, work with messy ad tags, etc.

When a publisher using the integration approves an order in isocket, we send it directly into their DFP server no differently than if an ad ops person entered it in by hand. Except in this case its auto-magic.

We’ve already soft-launched this plugin with a handful of our publishers. Now we’re looking for more – if you want to use the DFP plugin, please contact us.

And don’t forget – isocket is totally free for publishers until they sell their first ad. Why not apply today?

I Can Has Awesome Newz. We’re very happy to share that another awesome person has joined the isocket mission! Todd Sawicki is the Chief Revenue Officer of the Cheezburger Network (one of isocket’s super publishers) and an experienced advertising dude.

Todd is joining our advisory board, helping isocket slay the advertising beast along with great folks like Gokul Rajaram and David Scacco. We also recently welcomed KISSmetrics Founder & CEO Hiten Shah to our Board of Directors.

The official bio:

Todd Sawicki, Chief Revenue Officer at Cheezburger Network. He is an entrepreneur at heart with more than 16 years of experience in online startups, media companies and everything in between. Todd has worked in senior sales and marketing management with many startups at the cross roads of media and monetization including most recently Lookery and is on the advisory boards for Wetpaint and BuddyTV.

Please welcome Todd in the comments or on twitter @sawickipedia!

For our latest publisher announcement (I love doing these) I say that we mix it up a bit and do a little bit of role playing. I’ll be me and you be you — cool? Ready, go.

Me: Oh. My. Goodness.

You: What?

Me: Did you hear about the new website that isocket is working with?

You: Ummm, no. Who? Is it someone cool?

Me: Heck yes, it’s Vator.tv. They’re like, only one of the coolest startup news sites on the entire internet…and the internet is BIG.

You: For real?

Me: Yep, for real.

See, that was fun, right?

Our short, yet awkward conversation aside, Vator.tv is an awesome website that’s dedicated to being the go-to location for all things startups. They’re focusing on not only building a site that posts original and insightful content, but they’re also building up an active community of startup geeks like me (and maybe you). The bottom line is, it’s a great place for tech and startup junkies to hangout so if you’re into that kinda thing you definitely should check it out for yourself.

From an advertising perspective Vator.tv has a great audience if you’re looking to get the word to the startup ecosystem about your business, product or service. If you’re interested you can check out their isocket page here — as you’ll see it’s a great place for you to get some serious exposure for a reasonable price. If you’re an advertiser you can’t for much more than that, right?

We’re super excited to announce that VentureLoop is now using isocket to power it’s direct ad sales. If you’re in the startup world I can almost guarantee that you’ve heard of VentureLoop because it’s the best place to find jobs at startups that have been funded with venture capital. Basically this means that if you want to work at a startup that actually has enough money to pay you, then this should be the first place you start looking. Not that there’s anything wrong with working for a little sweat equity here and there (been there, done that), but I would say more times than not getting paid for your work is probably a good thing.

Check out those sweet ad spaces

VentureLoop has relationships with all of the big time venture capitalists who then post all of the available jobs for their portfolio companies on the job board. Just for fun I searched for how many jobs were available for all companies within 5 miles of San Francisco and over 1200 jobs were open and looking for someone to fill them as soon as possible. I mean somebody’s got to fill them, why not you?

Go ahead, buy now (don’t be scared)

From an advertising perspective VentureLooop gets a ton of traffic from the startup world including startup founders, job-seekers, venture capitalists and job recruiters which makes it an awesome place for business services to get some exposure. Not to mention it’s super affordable — right now a monthly 125×125 ad will only set you back $500 bucks, which sounds like a good deal to me. If you think you’re interested in giving their advertising a try all you need to do is click here to buy now.

Now that we are working with VentureLoop, TechCrunch, DigitalTrends and a few more publishers that we haven’t announced yet, we’re starting to build up a nice tech category. If you’re a tech website and are looking for a better way to sell your ads, we’d love to have you join up, too.

We’re giddy like little school girls with Beiber Fever to let you know that isocket has a shiny new free trial and we lowered two of our monthly prices!

It’s more than a trial, really – isocket is totally free until you sell your first ad! No time limits, no credit cards, yet fully functional and fully awesome. Start selling your own ads completely risk free.

Free trials are awesome aren’t they? Yeah, we tend to think so, too. It practically erases the fear of having buyer’s remorse simply by removing the buying until, you know, you actually like what you’re about to pay for. Yep, free trials are pretty much the bomb.

We lowered the price on our basic tier and added a new one!

isocket’s lowest entry tier was $49/month for up to 1 million ad impressions. That was a great price, but we thought we could do better. So we shaved off $10 down to $39 per month. Compare that to a commission-based service, and you could put an average of $750 more in your pocket each month.

We’ve been pleasantly surprised to see some lower traffic websites do really well on isocket. Some as low as 30,000 – 50,000 page views per month. To show our love for the bootstrapping bloggers, we’ve created a new tier: up to 500,000 impressions per month for $19. Yeah, $19.

You can check out all of the plans we offer over here on our handy-dandy pricing page (office dogs included) and if you have any questions feel free to leave us a note in the comments below and we’ll get you any details you need. Cool? Cool.

Why all this awesomeness and how does the free trial work?

Why all of this talk about free trials, you ask? Great question. We did this because being successful with direct sales doesn’t happen overnight for many websites. Selling your own ads is like selling a product – and just like with any other new product that you might offer for sale, you need to package it well, promote it, bring customers in the door, etc. And that can take time.

The free period is fully functional and has no time limits. It could last 3 days or 3 months, up until you sell your first ad. When you get your first order, you’ll activate your account and put in your credit card. Then you can run the first order and our monthly fee will begin.

So we don’t want anyone to pay for our product until they know they like it and it provides them value. We believe that strongly in our mission. And we believe more websites should at least have the chance to give direct sales a try without any risk.

To our current customers: you were automatically rolled over into the best fit for you. If you haven’t sold anything yet, you’re on free trial. And because we love you so much, if you signed up within the few weeks prior to this change we put a refund on your CC.

Request an invitation and get started risk free!

So now there’s literally no reason why any publisher who wants to step up their direct ad sales shouldn’t give us a try. We’re free to use and we’re currently powering sites like TechCrunch, I Can Has Cheesburger, Digital Trends, Lookbook.nu and Gamezebo. If you think you’re ready to give us a shot, it’s super easy:

1. Apply here: http://isocket.com/apply
2. Get approved and set up your ads.
3. ??????? (but at least it’s free!)
4. Profit!

Always free for advertisers

Remember all you marketers – isocket is always completely free for you to use. The only thing you pay is the actual cost of your campaign, 100% of which goes directly to the publisher. And we’ve got some great tools baking in the isocket kitchen that we’ll announce shortly