Adtools

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 [...]

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 [...]

So, having just returned from a great Admonsters Publisher Event in Amsterdam I’ll be posting up quite a few related articles and links.There was a huge amount of discussion surrounding Real Time Bidding (RTB) platforms. As a publisher we rarely get to see some of the inner-workings of how these systems work but luckily there [...]

Google have released a ‘network panel‘ to their Developer Tools that acts in a very similar way to other HTTP tracing tools like httpFox and httpWatch. This is a very welcome addition to an excellent set of tools for Chrome and means you’ll easily be able to trace what calls are being made from adtags [...]

More info: http://www.iab.net/ne_guidelines Guidelines document [PDF]

The excellent malwaredomains.com highlights a story coming from James McQuaid at securehomenetwork.blogspot.com about a potential huge malware attack. The article describes a huge SEO malware campaign utilizing thousands of machine-generated domains combining black hat SEO poisoning with virulent malware infections. http://securehomenetwork.blogspot.com/2011/01/massive-blackhat-seo-malware-campaign.html It occurs to me that the timing is very apt. As we head towards [...]

The Problem: Your company is developing an app that will utilise your adserver to deliver and render ads. How do you ensure that the app is calling the right ads and then later when it’s in use by your users how do you check problems with adcalls into that app without recourse to httpWatch, FireBug [...]

Found a very simple mechanism to reduce (or increase) audio levels in FLV video files. Historically this has always been a pain to work as we would normally need to demux the files and work on the audio and then remux them. This technique uses the open-source ffmpeg package, you don’t really need to know [...]

Ghostery is a new free service/browser-plugin for IE, Firefox & Chrome which highlights many tracking, behavioural & analytics tags (commonly referred to as web-bugs or pixels) on a site’s page. More importantly from our industry’s perspective is that it can also act as filtering mechanism and gives the user direct access to block any/all of [...]

I was recently running through my followers on Twitter (which I apologise for as I don’t do it as often as I should) and discovered I was being followed by http://advalidation.com/. To say that this site ticks a hole swathe of ‘to do’ boxes on my development list is to do it a dis-service. If [...]