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!

Very soon we’ll be launching a whole new redesign for inside the isocket.com / buyads.com product. We wanted to do a better job of giving people a heads up about product changes, so here’s a tasty preview!

(Update November 10th: It’s live!)

This new version covers everything you see once you log into the app: dashboard, account setup, profiles, inventory, order management, and so on. It does not include the public face of BuyAds (the directory, website profile pages, and cart/buying) but those areas are already being redesigned and we hope to take it live in early December. (Have a request? Let us know!)

We are super excited about this! There are pieces of inside the product we’ve been itching to update for some time. We’re continually striving to improve and through excellent feedback from our awesome community we think this is a big step up.

There were a few main things we wanted to accomplish in the redesign:

• Always & easily know if you need to take any actions. Ad orders have a life cycle which need human involvement from time to time (like approving an order), and we know it could get confusing about who needed to do what and when.
• Make it easier to see at a glance what you’ve sold or bought. 
• Bring everything related to an ad campaign order onto one page, the Order page. Metrics, payments, changing creatives… everything in one place makes it easier to manage a given order.
• Clearly show the relationships between different entities like groups and properties. Lets say you’re a publisher with one website… simple enough. But if you manage multiple websites under one group (e.g. AOL Tech includes TechCrunch & Engadget) it was a little disorganized. That’s been cleaned up to show that a Group owns Properties, a Property owns Inventory (ad zones), Inventory can have multiple remnant and pricing options, and so on.
• Overall look and feel upgrades. Pretty pixels make our <3 warm.

Here’s some sneak peeks!

Love it? Hate it? We’re working hard to make the best product you’ve ever used in advertising, so please let us know what you think! (P.S. all the data in these screen shots is fake demo data)

Everything has been touched in this new version, starting with the high level organization. For publishers, things are still broken up between Orders and Inventory, but everything beneath that has been reorganized.

The dashboard is a lot more useful now. It shows aggregated metrics, active orders, and any important actions you need to take.

Inventory is now organized vertically, meaning you start with your group (if you have multiple websites) and can drill down into a specific property and then into specific ad zones on that property.

Group:

Property:

Orders:

On your main orders page you’ll see an aggregated metrics chart, quick summaries of your active / running / pending campaigns, and then a nice list of orders.

Order details:

This is the area that has been the most improved in the new version. Orders can be complicated things – who pays whom when, what if dates need to change, the publisher needs to approve a new creative, and so on. We know the old version could get confusing, so we started from scratch on this page.

You’ll notice a very clear progress bar up top, plus status messages for both the campaign and payment. Things change as the order progresses – for example, when the ad is ready to run it will show the publisher the “order specific ad tag” they can use to traffic the campaign. Or when the campaign is running it will show the metrics specific to that campaign!

Better Order Fulfillment

Order Fulfillment is one of the coolest isocket features that some publishers still don’t know about. It makes it easy for publishers to create their own orders – whether its an in-house or test order, for an advertiser that you closed a deal with over the phone, etc. We made it easier to find and use!

What do you think? Cheers!

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!

One of isocket’s great features for publishers is the ability to control what shows up in your ad space when it’s unsold. Don’t want to be forced into using a gray “advertise here” banner? No worries, change it.

Today we improved this system by adding support for multiple remnant choices. So for any given ad zone, you can run multiple ad networks and place holders. They will all rotate evenly. Pretty simple, right?

The four basic remnant options:

1. A gray “advertise here” banner. The default option. We always suggest using this as part of your remnant. It’s a great tangible way to let your audience know “psst, you can click and buy me!” – it’s important to let potential advertisers know you are open for business!
2. Custom placeholders. You can upload your own image with a custom landing URL. Some publishers use this to display customized branded “advertise here” banners. Like this great example… 
3. You can plug in any third party ad code / ad tag. When our ad server says “OK, no ad is sold, so show a remnant one instead” we will call whatever ad tag you entered. The basic use case is plugging in a remnant ad network like AdSense. This can be a great way for publishers to keep making the *cough* pennies they are making from ad networks in between their premium sold ads.
4. Show nothing. Wait, nothing? Yeah! A growing number of publishers are saying “if I haven’t sold a premium ad, I don’t want to show anything at all. No point diluting my website with crappy ads just to make $0.05.” If you chose this, isocket will show nothing and “collapse” the ad zone, almost as if it wasn’t there.

How to create multiple remnant banners:

When you create a new zone, you still pick one remnant option. This is your default remnant.

Once an ad zone is created, click “Remnant” under the right zone in the main list. This shows the 1 or more remnant banners running for that ad zone. You can add, subtract, etc. They will all rotate evenly. Please note it can take up to 15 minutes for your changes to be seen live on your website.

Like any other product that wants to become the most awesome thing ever, isocket feels like getting feedback and ‘constructive criticism’ is super important. So important, in fact, that we have had a uservoice page since we’ve had a public page to put it on. Seriously, we even blogged about it (yeah, THAT important).

Case in point (not that you need proof), this suggestion was brought up by one of our publishers and we rolled it into the live app within just a few days. Can I get a boo yah?

Besides getting feedback we make it a high priority to answer any questions that we can regarding our product and how it can work for different types of publishers. I’m not sure if you know this or not, but if you talked to 50 different publishers who are generating revenue from ads they are probably doing it 50 different ways. When you keep this in mind, the fact that many publishers need some questions answered before they use us isn’t surprising.

To help facilitate the answering of these questions we have just rolled out live chat functionality that anyone who is browsing our website can use at any time. Even though having live chat is pretty cool, the real reason for us implementing it is that many publishers don’t know what questions they’ll have until they look over our pricing and features and we want to be there to answer the questions they have right when they need them answered.

Here’s what the live chat looks like on an external, public isocket page:

Another cool thing that we’ve done is include the live chat functionality on all of our publisher’s internal isocket pages so that if they have a question about how to set something up or if they have feedback they want to share, they can do it quick and easy.

Here’s what the live chat looks like on an internal, customer-only isocket page:

At the very least Jason and I will be standing by for live chat during our business hours (and any other time we’re available online), but if for some reason we’re not available for live chat when a question comes up the chat app turns into an email tool that allows a screenshot of the page you’re on to be sent directly to us.

We’ve already used live chat to help out a few of our current isocket publishers after only launching it a few days ago and we’ve also been able to answer questions for several other people who were looking at what we had to offer. If you want to give it a shot, feel free go to http://isocket.com and start chatting it up with us — real humans are standing by.

If you’re curious about what live chat product we’re using, it’s called SnapEngage and all of us here at isocket would highly recommend it if you’re currently looking for a solution.

Also, just so you know — we’re not completely getting rid of UserVoice — we’re going to link to it somewhere internally on isocket so that our customers can still use it to make suggestions and to keep up with the progress of new features we’re going to be rolling out.

When we launched our public beta in July, we started to promote our features and pricing for the first time. Since then we’ve made isocket more flexible and powerful, while bringing on many new publishers. We’ve listened to questions & comments we got from our customers and based on that feedback, we’ve updated some of our public pages.

The new pages state our mission more clearly: we make advertising suck less. They also succinctly lay out some of the top reasons for joining isocket.

We also split off an independent page about pricing – check it out. We simplified some of the tiers and used our awesome office dogs to add some personality (as you can tell, we love our dogs!)

For example, you can sell/serve up to 5 million ad impressions per month for only $99. Publishers switching from commission-based services are literally putting thousands more in their pocket each month, just by switching.

We think you’ll find these new pages to be clear and compelling. Take a look and let us know what you think in the comments or on twitter at @isocket!

Many new isocket publishers wonder “what does it look like for my advertisers?” – which is a great question to ask, because after all it’s your ad sales experience.

We generally recommend that you don’t create some fake orders to check out the process. It can clutter up your real data, date scheduling, etc.

So instead, we put together a ~4 minute video explaining the full process. It’s also available in the support section. Check it out!

Summary of the flow:

1. Advertiser finds your profile, either via isocket or directly from the website.
2. Checks out the group profile – brand, audience, traffic info and a menu of ad inventory.
3. Places an order for a specific ad package.
4. Seller gets email – “congrats, you sold an ad!” – sees all the order details (who bought it, the creative, etc)
5. Seller approves or rejects the order.
6. If approved, we take care of the painful parts like money and serving.
7. Buyer and seller can see metrics, change creative, and so on.

It’s amazing how many advertising products and companies out there don’t support their customers… like, at all. Even normal online shopping sites make it difficult to find a phone number – and I’d argue that buying a trinket online is more straight forward than configuring an ad server or a multifaceted campaign.

–> Have you had any awful advertising support experiences? Share some horror stories in the comments!

Hopefully you’ve noticed that not only do we offer support… we barely stop short of throwing it in your face. isocket has a toll free phone number that any customer can call, and if it’s between 10am and 6pm Pacific, we make our best effort to have a real live currently-wearing-pants human pick up the phone.

We love talking with our current, potential, and past customers. We’re here to build an amazing product and company, and the best way to do that is by listening. We’re addicting to helping – so don’t be shy!

New support area + awesome learning guides

We’re starting to beef up our in-product help area. We just released a new support page, including a FAQ with an Ask Jeeves style input:

We also released a getting started guide and some tips about growing your ad sales. For example:

• How to price your inventory
• How to build an awesome .com/advertise sales page on your website
• How to find and reach advertisers
• How to promote your inventory

We’ll eventually blog out these guides and tips to the public. For now, they’re just for isocket users

Getting Started Guide

Once you’ve done the basic account setup, there’s still some work in configuring your ad zones and inventory packages (sockets). We know some publishers are new to the direct sales game or need a refresher – so check out this guide if you need help rounding out your account setup. It includes:

1. Basic account setup, billing, payout, etc
2. Setting up ad zones
3. Installing ad code on your website or ad server
4. Creating your ad packages (sockets)
5. Some isocket policies, like how we handle payments.

Hope they help – good luck!

Let’s say you have a single medium rectangle on the top right of your website. It’s one of your prime spots. You want to sell it on a tenancy basis (by week, month, etc) – but the economics might not make sense for only one advertiser to get that spot at a time.

Today we released a new feature to solve that problem. You can now sell multiple campaigns in the same zone by tenancy! Previously, CPM was the only way to sell multiple campaigns on top of each other, because the impressions would just balance each other out over time.

Page load #1:

Page load #2:

Scheduling

We still take care of all the date scheduling. isocket will keep track of each zone’s availability day by day.

For example, you have a zone sold for 7 days at a time that can have up to 2 advertisers at once. Scenario:

1. Buyer A comes along. They buy from August 5th to August 12th.
2. Buyer B comes along. They buy from August 10th to August 17th.
3. Buyer C comes along and wants to buy on August 4th. Our scheduler will tell her it’s not available, but they could try starting August 3rd or 13th.

Here’s how to set it up:

We added one little field in the socket creation process. If you’re making a tenancy socket, it will ask “Do you want this to rotate?”. The default is no – meaning only one person can guy it at a time. If you choose yes, it will show a drop down where you can select 2, 3, or 4 advertisers.

Why did we cap it at 4?

We haven’t seen many practical use cases with people rotating more than 4 buyers in a single tenancy zone. Plus at that point, it becomes unfair to the advertiser and you should just switch to a CPM based unit.

What happens to my remnant?

One of the cool isocket features is the ability to set your own remnant – i.e. what shows up when you haven’t sold a premium ad.

If you have an active campaign but aren’t fully sold out of your rotation spots, isocket will rotate among the current campaigns. So if you have 1 order running, it will get 100% of the impressions.

If you’d like to rotate some of your remnant by default in the scenario above, let us know!

Yesterday we uploaded our new weekly build of isocket. Among some general bug fixes and tweaks, we launched another often requested feature – you can now have multiple user accounts under the same group!

An isocket group is like a brand. If the Wall Street Journal used isocket to sell their ads, then the group would be WSJ and each of their sales people would have an account.

This is great because some sellers have different sales or ad ops people involved in different areas. For example, one of our publishers has a sales rep for accounts over $50k, and another sales rep for more self-service oriented orders under $50k. Each one can create and manage their separate sales through isocket, while still benefiting from a central dashboard.

For now, every group member is equal and can do the same things (edit info, etc). In the future we might build in different permissions and admin statuses.

Your different people will show up on your group profile, so that potential advertisers can see who they’re working with. When looking at a specific socket, only the user who manages that socket will show up.

How to invite people

It’s pretty straight forward. Go to your Account and select the new menu item for “Invite Group Members”. Here’s what it looks like: