Here the comment from Joana Omari:

From: Joana Omari 
Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2008 1:03 PM
Cc: 'Tooka Iravani'
Subject: Brand Central

Hi,

Hope you are both well. Just a quick note to inform you

of some good news: Brand Central has been tested and has

now been approved as a third party ad server for campaigns on BBC.com.

All the best,

Joana Al-Omari
Online Sales Manager, BBC.COM

Campaign and flight data can be viewed on screen or conviently exported into Microsoft Excel reports (with charts) showing the data grouped and totalled by the city of origin, e.g. where the impression, click or post-click activity was originated from. Total and unique data per campaign and per flight is available.

The geotargeting database with country and city information is updated on a monthly base and as accurate as paid supplier databases provide the data.

The net total budget column is calculated as the sum of all flight net cost (or budget) from the client to the publisher, which is the line item unit price * number of impressions, clicks etc. booked minus any media discounts provided.

The total net budget amount typically matches the booking order value on the purchase order to the publisher. When drilling down into e.g. flight reporting, the break down by flight is also shown as ‘Cost per Click’, ‘Total Cost’ and ‘Cost to Date’.

Clients or Agencies do not have that net budget column as it refers to potential confidential data kept in the seperate media planning module.

The sort order (ascending or descending) of a particular column is indicated by a small up or downward arrow, and the priority of the order by a small number. In the below screen shot we are sorting in alphabetical order by media planner first, and then in descending numerical order by planned impressions.

The actual sort classification (alphabetic, numerical, by date) is automatically determined by the data format in the column.

Switching between ascending and descending sort order is achieved by clicking the column header of the table again, and by default ascending turns into descending and after another click the column is taken out of the sort order automatically. Another click adds it back into the sort order ascending, and another one then descending and so on.

If the user’s settings (in the main user default settings) are set to ‘toggle between ascending and descending’, then the column always remains in the sort algorithm and only gets taken out if the particular table is being called from the main menu again, the sort order of that particular column basically ‘toggles’ between ascending and descending, then ascending and descending again.

Best advice: Just try it out!

Our new tier-3 DNS server is relaxed, no time delays and even the SQL cluster and Brand Central engine runs at less than 15% capacity - so here we go to maybe crack the 100 million mark by Christmas?

User documentation can be found in the related knowledge base article .

Please let us know any test results or bugs via the Brand Central blog .

Although Brand Central’s tracking mechanism follows the strict international guidelines of organizations of IAB, ABCE, BPA and 24/7 - in fact we did ask for support from these guys who were very helpful in the first place (robots.txt list, unique user calculation etc.), we feel that providing as many 3rd party tracking options as possible will add value to the system.

As a first step, DoubleClick will be available but we will keep our options open to extend the tracking capabilities of BC. If anyone has any suggestions of other
3rd party tracking systems / tags to be integrated please let me know.

1. Cookie Says:
   July 9th, 2006 at 7:59 pmThinking Local and Going Global. Excellent approach, congratulations and well done!It is refreshing to see a Middle East based company, create first and innovate, and then work on enhancing, as opposed to immediately referring to international work and tools, simply acting out as a co-ordinator role.Practises like these, is what is required to make this region and Online industry stand out more, and take it into a leading role as opposed to being a follower.
2. Magnus Says:
   July 10th, 2006 at 8:03 am Congratulations, that seems to be a really big deal for you. I remember in the very early days when online advertising was just getting started DoubleClick was in so much trouble for doing things like tracking coockies across sites (third party cookies) and stuff like that. That’s more or less accepted now I guess (although I reject those in my browser . Things evolve.
3. Martin Diessner Says:
   July 10th, 2006 at 9:31 amThanks Magnus - yes I remember these times. 3rd party cookies are still an issue - people forget to set the P3P privacy policies and then wonder why results are “weired” or things not working properly, sites getting blocked.Brand Central uses 3rd party cookies without saving personalized user information, and the P3P policy states exactly that. We continously attempt to improve the system and are happy about any constructive feedback.

We have added a small feature which allows agencies to produce dynamic creative that is personalized based on the login data of registered users within a publisher’s site. A good example is e.g. AME Info where users should be logged in to the site, in order to use most of the functionalities of the portal, and where that login data can be used to show personalized ads. For instance, based on the user’s nationality, the creative could show text in the user’s mother tongue, or images related to the user’s gender and so on.

The following data fields are being supported by BrandCentral’s ad delivery system and can be easily used within Flash banners without much programming:

• bcFirstname, bcLastname - great for personalized greetings
• bcEmail - good for send to friend functionality within a banner
• bcCompany - for personalized ads, e.g. bank’s approved list of companies for secured and unsecured loans
• bcGender - for personalized creative e.g. images or even product ranges
• bcNationality - great for language
• bcDOBDay, bcDOBMonth, bcDOBYear - age can be easily calculcated and then personalized creative shown
• bcCity - for personalization based on geographic location

The first two publishers that enabled the interface from their site are AME Info and 7DAYS, and I am sure others will follow shortly.

So, how can you make use of this feature? Brief your clients on this added value and think about implementing this at the very first time that you develop your media and creative strategy for an online campaign, e.g. for an airline client the destination for a global promotion could be dynamically pre-selected. I personally would then see an Emirates Airline ad promoting Munich or Dusseldorf, whereas someone from the UK would see Manchester and London related creative formats. Overall, this should improve the quality of the ads, and hence increase CTR, lower CPC and add value to the campaign.

For the creative people, here are some guidelines:

1. Implementation is very easy - you can reference ANY of the above variables by calling them in the Flash banners using _root.VARIABLE_NAME and then use dynamic text boxes in order to play with the values of the parameter, or run any action script that will then do the personalization job. Please remember to reference root in case you are in nested movie clips, e.g. _root.bcFirstname should be used. Also note that the variables are case sensitive as per Macromedia’s regulations.
2. In order to test your ads in an environment outside AME Info or 7DAYS, just simply copy and paste the personalization code from either one of the websites in a test.html file and place the BrandCentral launch code underneath, and it will work.

An example of a current campaign using personalization is the latest Emaar South Ridge campaign, running on AME Info and 7DAYS. Please see screen shot below:

Personalized ads

Lastly, please be assured that any personal data being used is not stored or sent anywhere outside the publisher’s domain - in fact due to the Macromedia Sandbox security the data remains on the publisher’s domain unless they open themselves with a crossborder security file. However, we should focus on the creative aspects of adding value by personalized ads.

Please direct any questions to me via email, many thanks for your support!

Good news - besides AME Info and 7DAYS, now also www.zawya.com has activated personalized ads with bcFirstName and bcLastName.

I can only encourage more online media agencies to use this feature - imagine an airline ad that says “Hi ##FIRSTNAME##, why not flying for AED 1,000 to ##YOURHOMECOUNTRY##” - wouldn’t you all agree that this will achieve much better results?

Result: Client blames it on creative and media agency, and we tell the (online) publishers off and tell them no more budgets unless they find the right users for our client’s products, oh and by the way: Make them buy it right away!

Obviously, it’s about match making, almost like in real life (I like blondes ). If we could predict, what kind of user is going to what kind of website, and then enable the online publisher to show RELEVANT ads to the user online?

With a new functionality added to ‘Brand Central’ recently, we started to profile unique users accross the Middle East and monitor their individual user behaviour online. So far, approximately 6.8% of the ME internet community has been identified and their online behaviour recorded. We are able to pull from the databases in real time any relevant information to advertising, e.g. what ads the user has been exposed to, on what ads did the user click and most importantly, what post-click action such as browsing client’s website or any e-Commerce related actions were undertaken by the user.

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