Campaign and flight reporting guarantees an audited process for publishers to proof for delivered impressions, especially as there is optional DoubleClick integration provided. Since Brand Central streams all creative centrally, publishers benefit from zero streaming costs, which are in turn covered by Flip Media.

Brand Central provides a central platform for regional and international websites to publish their rate cards, demographic, psychographic and geographic data as well as any other user and web statistics, which in turn provides relevant information to clients and agencies and the whole media planning process.

Since Brand Central is not limited to only websites, it can be used in a variety of media that stretches across SMS, digital TV, mobile portals, PDA devices, information touch screens, ATMs, Wi-fi stations and any internet connected digital screens.

Due to the high reach and market share of Brand Central, more than 13 million Middle East Internet users are on its database, profiled on behavior. For example, the system can report if the user accessing a site has ever clicked on a banner in the airline industry, or what the average click-through rate of that user is, or if that user ever purchased an airline ticket online. Based on such user behavior information, Brand Central helps publishers to match banners and campaigns to users, thus dramatically enhancing the effectiveness of a campaign.

All key measurement data (impressions, click and post-click activities) as well as related performance ratios (click through rate, cost per click, convergence rate, cost of acquisition) are available as per different parameters i.e. time, country, language, publisher, and many other filter and selection criteria.

A daily optimization process in one system (compared to multiple trafficking systems) allows just one person to handle 10-20 campaigns a day.  Brand Central also automatically optimizes campaigns, e.g. if an English creative outperforms the Arabic, or multiple creative options achieve significantly different results, the system adjusts performance based on the objective of the campaign.

Brand Central is also linked to common financial and accounting packages, where it creates purchase and sales orders as well as invoices, without having to re-enter huge amounts of data by hand, saving traffickers and finance administrators valuable time.

Banners, text ads, video and other streaming ads can be uploaded into Brand Central, which stores all online creative on multiple servers. This makes sure that that the delivery of banners to any publishers website happens at extremely high speed.

All creative is managed centrally which means it can be replaced easily. This could happen in a variety of scenarios, like a change of message or price, unavailability of a product or extreme cases like the one with Emirates Airlines, who pulled out all advertising during the mourning period in January 2006. One can switch off all commercial creative and/or replace it with another message across 220 media publishers’ websites, in the blink of an eye.

Creative directors now have the ability to create custom-made interactive messages that address each segment of the target audience differently, based on age, nationality, country and other details providing much higher success rates and ROI for the advertisers.

One of the latest features is personalized creative, where, depending on the website’s user performance or his/her login details, personalized banner ads can be shown.

On-screen media planning provides real time access to all historical performance related data, by client, publisher, banner size, language and other information. This information dates back 4 years and covers the entire Middle East region.

One can also get an instant overview of all published and negotiated rate cards for more than 220 online media owners. Media plans are exported from Brand Central web 2.0 platform into Excel using customizable skins depending on the agency’s brand colors etc.

Who else but Brand Central tell you that the Arabic skyscraper (120×600) on AME Info surpasses the English skyscraper on the same site by 6 times in terms of performance? Brand Central has all this information and supports media planners with an advanced planning module. At any point in time, Brand Central double checks on budget constraints, verifies rates and also provides aid to media planners on proper forward media planning by selecting the right choice of banner sizes, languages and publishers.

For instance, one can execute an online media campaign at the click of a button. How?
The brief, which includes information about target audience, budget, timelines and clients recommendations, is entered into Brand Central. On the basis of this information, one of the Brand Central approved agencies is selected to execute media planning.

A client can also approve all online creative material within Brand Central before a campaign goes live. And when the campaign is running, real time reports on literally everything that can be tracked are available to the client at a click of a button. These reports are available as Excel files for download or easy-to-understand graphs.

All campaign optimization and reporting (including screen shots of creative running on publishers sites) is handled centrally by Brand Central. This ensures confidentiality and comfort for the client, and also provides control over the online media budgets.

It’s a one stop-shop platform for marketing managers and clients, advertising agencies and creative directors, media planners and media buying agencies, and media portals and publishers.

With more than 65% market share, Brand Central has become the 3rd party certified approval tracking and management system for online media buying in the Middle East and beyond. It was developed in 2002 and is currently available in version 3.0 serving two out of three online ads in the Middle East, being used by more than 25 agencies, 150 clients and 220 media publishers.

Key Data:

• Brand Central is used by 25+ agencies, 150+ clients and brands, 220+ publishers across the region, and increasingly also abroad e.g. Africa, Europe and Asia.
• In the Middle East, 2 out of 3 online banners are being handled by Brand Central and more than 600 campaigns, 7000 flights and 3000 different creative have been run so far in 2006.
• 13 million out of 18 million regional internet users (Source: Madar Research) have a personal user profile with campaign historical performance data in Brand Central.
• More than 25 Terra Byte of banners are being streamed by Brand Central’s server farm annually.
• The average ROI increase of campaigns by Brand Central’s optimization module is between 35%-60% over and above ‘manual’ or ‘human’ campaign optimization.