Adtools

Finding suitably in-depth, accessible and free training materials for iOS/iPhone/iPad etc is something I’ve been looking to find for a long time now. Understanding the development lifecycle as well as the opportunities this platform offers publishers (specifically relating to the advertising opportunities they provide us) is an area I have struggled with in the past year. That’s why I’m very happy to see a number of Universities are making complete course lectures/tutorials available online (mainly through iTunes University) and in some instance all handouts and associated code/projects. This is to be highly commended and is a position I would like to see more colleges and institutions adopt.

Arguing for training resource is something that we really shouldn’t have to spend too much time doing. This is a fast moving industry with new technologies, concepts and business practices seemingly emerging every other week. If we don’t keep ourselves abreast of these changes and their potential impact on our business operations then who else will? But, the realities are that new technology will get released after training budgets have been agreed and then we find ourselves spending valuable time on the cost-benefits rather than concentrating on educating and equipping our staff/teams and bringing insights & knowledge to the wider business.

Now, you’re probably asking yourselves what learning iPhone programming has to do with Advertising Operations, after all it’s not like you’re looking for seasoned C++ developers when recruiting a new Trafficker or requiring your Campaign Managers to have a Degree in statistical methodologies. But my argument has always been that AdOps lies at that intersection of Technology/Development, Advertising Theory, Statistics/Analytics and Business Development. When new technology rears and the business want to know how to leverage advertising on it then we’re the ‘go-to’ people. When there is no-one else in the company who can give a view on some latest gadget or have an opinion on how such technologies can be brought under the wider advertising strategies… you need to speak to AdOps. Keeping abreast of technological change is second nature for AdOps people, if your business doesn’t have someone with AdOps experience who is consulting with your Business Development group then you’re missing a trick.

This isn’t about getting your staff to become iOS developers, it’s about educating them to understand how these devices work in order that they are then able to advise how best to implement advertising technologies.
The more your staff are empowered by this knowledge and understand how such systems work, then the easier it will be when managing the impact of their uptake by your customers. Ultimately this should feed into the overall approach your company takes in reacting rapidly to such huge changes in the technology landcape.

All of the following courses contain between 10 and 13 videos each of which last approx 1-2hrs and will require access to a Mac running Xcode.

iPhone Application Development [Stanford]
http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/iphone-application-development/id384233225#ls=1

Developing Apps for iOS [Stanford]
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=395631522

iPhone Application programming [RWTH Aachen]
http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/iphone-application-programming/id390395304

Advanced iPhone Development [Madison Area Technical College]
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=407243032

I ran across this presentation slide-deck recently. It provides a thorough insight into the their underlying platforms, technology & infrastructure implementation (including some screen shots of their internal cloud management platform, based on Amazon’s AWS).

But what has this to do with Advertising Operations? Well, I feel the similarities occur when thinking about building scalable & highly redundant/available systems (as they say themselves, they value availability over consistency). There’s quite a deep dive into their decision about using Cassandra which I found insightful and educational and well worth trying to get to grips with as it’s becoming increasingly clear that the whole NoSQL field (certainly in so far as the amount of data we are able to generate within online-advertising systems) has many benefits over traditional DB systems.

Whilst discussing the ‘Data’ issue with my boss recently we referred to Ben Kneen’s excellent blog AdOpsInsider, specifically to a series of articles he wrote back in July concerning Data Management

Data Management Part I: What Are Data Management Platforms?
Data Management Part II: Centralize and Synchronize Your User Data
Data Management Part III: Syncing Online Data to a Data Management Platform
Data Management Part IV: Syncing Offline Data To Your DMP

I’d thoroughly recommend reading these as they are a great introduction to the whole data/DMP field from a specifically AdOps perspective. Irrespective of whether you currently have any plans or strategies around leveraging the data your various adserving, analytics & behavioural platforms provide, these articles will give a solid view of what and how these technologies can start to work together.

(Via MalwareDomainBlocklist.)

Bash commands to detect script injections and malware:
This was posted a while ago on stopbadware and it’s too good not to repost…

find . -name “*.js” | xargs grep -l “eval(unescape”
find . -name “*.php” | xargs grep -l “eval(base64_decode”

The first one will find any javascript file that contains the string “eval(unescape” which is the most common way of injecting malicious code. The second is a similar method for PHP files. (Source: https://badwarebusters.org/stories/show/20712)

We all know the Luma Landscapes diagram, we use it to scare our managers into how complex Advertising Operations, Inventory Management, Yield Optimisation etc… really is, and it usually does the job. However it was not meant for ‘us’, it was designed to give Investors an idea of the the complexities and nuances of the online advertising universe.

If you’ve not seen this already Joelle Frijters over at Improve Digital has recently posted up an article which takes that Luma landscape concept and reworks it.

Personally I prefer the Improve Digital version. Not only does it simplify the layout but it logically groups them into their core areas of specialism (and in doing so I feel clarifies the current field or providers & operators) but there’s also a helpful glossary of the every-changing acronyms we like to use.

Article: http://www.improvedigital.com/improve-digitals-display-advertising-eco-system-map-201112-gets-great-reviews
PDF: here

Mozilla Popcorn is a suite of Javascript libraries that enable easy authoring of video for the web using HTML5.

They position it as jQuery for video and the little time I’ve had to play with it would certainly support this notion. With the recent announcement from Adobe of their discontinued development of Mobile Flash this comes at a very opportune time. It’s OpenSource and fully extensible with it’s own plugin system (anyone fancy working on VAST support?) which I think will be one of it’s biggest benefits. I’ve got high-hopes for this project, anything that can level the playing field in HTML5 especially in video is to be applauded.

Link: http://mozillapopcorn.org/

Reports of Adobe pulling development of the mobile Flash player are currently lighting up my RSS reader. They plan to push their AIR products and HTML5 as preferred platforms instead.

I’ve got to be honest and say we’ve never run a Flash based mobile ad, so part of me is thinking that this isn’t going to affect us that much, however, it does mean those developers who were developing products across all three platforms now only have to worry about two. This, we can only hope equates to better time-to-market, reduced testing times and hopefully less complex development cycles.

Importantly it now signifies to us where we need to focus our product attention on development. So, the question is, do you have the requisite skills in your team (and personally) to support these technologies? If you don’t are there others in your wider organisation who do and if they’re not there either how will you ensure you meet these future requirements & needs of your advertisers & agencies?

CNet have a video article covering the news:

Here’s some stories (apologies if some of them are a bit sycophantic about Apple).
Wired: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/11/adobe-mobile-flash-dead/
Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/nov/09/adobe-flash-mobile-dead
LA Times: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/11/adobe-to-end-mobile-flash-plug-in-development.html

Netmining Panel: Mapping the Display Landscape (West Coast Edition) from Netmining on Vimeo. Industry experts discuss how to successfully navigate the constantly evolving display ecosystem and identify valuable best practices for marketers. The panel features Alex Hooshmand of BlueKai, Qasim Saifee of OpenX, Raj Gajwani of TARGUSinfo, Anna Partel of Right Media – Yahoo! and Jeremy Woodlee of Google. Moderated by Maureen Little of Turn.

Download Netmining’s Guide to the Display Landscape here:
http://www.netmining.com/displayguide/

I’ve been a fan of dummyimage.com for a while now. However, I’m also a huge kitten/cat fan and sometimes I don’t want drab monochrome test or placeholder images, what I really want is fluffy kittens instead. Thankfully there are others who think similarly, enter placekitten.com. Placekitten allows you to generate aribtrarily sized images and have them populated with a picture of a fluffy kitten. eg;

http://placekitten.com/300/250	http://placekitten.com/300/600

Link: http://placekitten.com

Ann Forbes Cooper at Adweek has released a list of what they see as “Ad Land’s” most innovative and creative programmers & developers and details some of their more inspirational creations. The list includes (in no particular order):

Joshua Hirsch, Big Spaceship
Marc Jensen, Space150
Ricardo Cabello, Freelancer
Aaron McGuire, Evolution Bureau
Markus Persson, Mojang AB
Evan Stark, Domani Studios
Scott Prindle, Crispin Porter + Bogusky
John Mayo-Smith, R/GA
Dave Riegler, TBWA\Chiat\Day
Keith Butters, The Barbarian Group

Link: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/top-10-technologists-135797.