Impact Engine, an advertising technology company, has announced the private beta release of a platform for the creation, management and placement of rich media ads, including video. The service allows advertisers to create their own ads and place them on a variety of sites, including Google and Yahoo. They can also track the ads to determine how they’ve been viewed. While the company provides an easy way for advertisers to create and manage video ads, it also provides a way for producers and publishers to participate. Agencies and videographers can generate revenue from templates they create that are used by advertisers, and publishers can create their own “Ad Stores” that allow advertisers to create ads on their own sites like they do at Impact Engine. Neil Greer, Impact Engine’s CEO discusses the introduction of the new platform and how advertisers, producers and publishers will use it.
iSPOT: Is Impact Engine in private beta now and how can companies participate?
Greer: Yes, we’re announcing that the company is in private beta. We’ve completed development of phase one of commercial release and we’re taking on beta customers. We’ve received numerous applications. If companies want to participate, they can go to www.impactengine.com and fill out the invitation form and we’ll get back to them.
iSPOT: Will advertising agencies be the biggest users?
Greer: Our starting point in the industry is with the publishers themselves as well as agencies and advertisers. The ecosystem we’re developing is going to allow professionals on the design side, including videographers and freelance designers, to earn income off the system, so suppliers and buyers will be involved.
iSPOT: Can you tell us how the system works to create and produce ads?
Greer: It can be used to create, produce and place ads. Users log onto the system and they’re immediately in an online ad door where they can browse through thousands of different templates. The gallery is a growing collection of ads you can use. Once you’ve found an ad you like, you save it into a favorites area we call a Lightbox and from there you enter into a builder to take the ad, without having any design or Flash expertise, through a Wizard interface and edit it with photos, text or video. You configure it so it’s applicable to your ad efforts, then check the ad out of the system and move it into our campaign area, which is where you manage the ads. You can take the ads from your campaign area and put them into whatever publishing opportunity you want, whether it’s Google or Yahoo or another publisher. We have over 120 publishers in the system. We give the codes to the webmaster and the publishers will notify the advertiser that the ad went live. Once the ads are published, you can go back into the system in the campaign area to see how the ad is performing. We provide metrics on everything from impression to click through rate to time spent, which allows the advertiser to get a full view of the performance.
iSPOT: On the Impact Engine page, a choice of industry, format and size is offered. To select a video ad, you click the format bar and select Premium Video.
Greer: Yes, it takes you to specific ad templates that support video.
iSPOT: When you do that, it shows five templates.
Greer: Those are the video templates, which is a piece of ad creative that accepts video. We could have made the decision to incorporate stock creative, the actual video content you could use in an ad, such as a testimonial for an auto dealership and all you’d have to do is edit the text, but that’s the domain of other service providers who we may have licensing relationships with. We don’t have stock videos, but we allow you to create an ad around existing video content which you can upload. Once you’ve added a template to the Lightbox, you click the edit button and upload the video.
iSPOT: Will you share revenue with the sites that run the ads that are created at Impact Engine?
Greer: The advertiser pays for the service so if the ad has been published through our site, the advertiser has paid and we don’t levy a fee to the publisher. There are two ways publishers can be involved. They can play ads that were created at Impact Engine and they can operate their own private label Ad Store. When they do that, we charge a fee to the publisher.
iSPOT: How do publishers set up an Ad Store?
Greer: There’s a store configuration panel on our site called My Ad Store. When it goes live you can click a button, which will ask which ads from your catalog do you want to go live. Then click create store and we’ll create one. This service will assist publishers who have big impediments to selling inventory, because advertisers can’t create ads on their own or agencies can’t place them. We give publishers a way to have their own retail store that provides a way for customers to build their ads.
iSPOT: How will producers be involved?
Greer: We have over 1,600 templates in our gallery and some have been created by agencies and freelance designers who will get a piece of the revenue that’s generated from the use of the ads. Upon launch, we’ll take applications from other design professionals to create ads. We provide the same experience for the agency as we do for the publishers. We provide a retail environment for their creative marketplace.
iSPOT: How will Impact Engine advance online video advertising?
Greer: There are two main ways. One is that we give publishers the ability to have their own self service display Ad Store to sell their own inventory complete with ad templates and the tools advertisers can use. The second is that we’re also giving agencies a way to pre-package their creative content and sell it as a new option for advertisers. They can make templates they’ve created available for publishers to add to the inventory of their Ad Stores. If Ogilvy created 35 templates, they can play them at their Ad Store which is a new way to get paid for their stock creative.
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