May 2012
2 posts
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Adaptly Introduces Evergreen to Maximize the Reach...
It is yet another big day for us at Adaptly! We reach two major milestones today as we not only release a new product, Evergreen, but also announce our Series B funding. All of us, Adaptlyians (Adaptly employees), are beyond excited with the native advertising possibilities around Evergreen, and even more thrilled about the opportunities that will emerge from the additional funding! Find more...
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Darren Herman Visits the Office!
By Meghan Sharkey, Director of Marketing
Last week the Adaptly team was lucky enough to have Darren Herman, Founder & Managing Director of kbs+p and Chief Digital Officer at The Media Kitchen, come into the office and provide some invaluable insight into the life of a media agency. Darren opened up the conversation by stating his views on the social media space and what he expects from it in...
April 2012
4 posts
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Adaptly Makes Time Inc.'s Top Ten NYC Startups to...
We were beyond excited to hear the news today that Adaptly has officially been selected as one of the top ten NYC startups to watch for in 2012 by Time Inc.! This is a huge milestone for the company and we are very honored to be included in the list. We owe much of our success to our loyal clients; we would not have made the list without all of your support and ongoing business. Of course we also...
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Adaptly EMEA Team Expands Further
LONDON, 11 April 2012: The EMEA office of social web advertising specialists Adaptly has been augmented with the arrival of Charlie Neer in the role of European Business Development Manager.
Neer joins Adaptly from Click District where he held the post Head of Technology for three years. This senior-level role saw Charlie collaborate on the design and...
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A Year in Review: Adaptly Celebrates Its 2nd...
By Meghan Sharkey, Director of Marketing
As most of you already know, yesterday, April 9th 2012, Adaptly celebrated its 2nd official birthday. We celebrated the occasion in the office with some festive cupcakes and lots of champagne! Needless to say, it was a great night filled with hilarious stories of favorite memories from the past year. Naturally, I wanted to share all of the amazing...
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Social Scandal: What to do if it happens to you
By Meghan Sharkey, Director of Marketing
The ease and speed of sending a message across social sites proves to be both the beauty and the beast of using the medium. In many ways it is a positive feature, people can literally reach their followers almost immediately with just a simple click of the button. However if managed poorly, a careless typo can cause irreparable damage to a brand or...
March 2012
2 posts
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An Update from Our Friends Across the Pond
By Paul Turner, Head of EMEA
As the eagle eyed amongst you know, Adaptly opened its first international office about 4 months ago and we thought we’d take this opportunity to update you on its progress! The idea of “going international” is always a bit of a leap of faith - different markets, different cultures, different ways of working - companies are inevitably challenged to adapt accordingly....
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Employee Spotlight: Let Us Introduce Mike
The Adaptly family recently expanded as we gained our newest member, Mike Finnegan as VP of Client Services. Mike’s role can be described as the glue that keeps everything together. He is responsible for making sure the house is kept together internally, establishing best practices within the teams, developing the strategic side of Adaptly and further making sure we have a robust approach...
February 2012
4 posts
5 tags
Wildfire and Adaptly Introduce First Social...
Big and exciting things are happening for Adaptly as we embark on a new partnership with Wildfire today! Wildfire, a social media marketing software company, provides complete tools for brands to create, publish and manage content to drive engagement. Integrating Adaptly’s technology into their software will enable marketers to optimize and measure the success of their paid social media. Now...
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Employee Spotlight: Meet Jason
Let us introduce you to the newest addition of the Adaptly family, Jason Briceno. Jason works with the engineering team as a Data Scientist, trying to optimize the ways that ads are placed. He graduated from Caltech in ’99 with a bachelor’s degree in Physics, making him the third member of the Adaptly Caltech crew! After graduation, Jason worked for a while doing instrumentation...
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Super Bowl XLVI: Event Based Targeting System by...
Download a larger version.
Here at Adaptly, we have always had the vision of creating a system that can intelligently design and run campaigns dynamically based on events or situations that occur in reality. Imagine your copy generating itself based on the most popular Twitter conversations or the Super Bowl score. Cool, huh? Yeah, we think so too.
Aside from just being awesome, a system capable...
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The Fifth Seat of Advertising
By Meghan Sharkey, Director of Marketing
Over the past few years, social has been fighting for the fifth seat at the advertising roundtable. Traditionally, there have always been the three dominant seats: Print, Radio, and TV. As the Internet became more popular, we began to see a fourth seat emerge: Digital. Digital advertising is a little bit more complicated than our original...
January 2012
4 posts
5 tags
Offline With a Sprinkle of Social
By Meghan Sharkey, Director of Marketing
Marketers are recognizing the power of utilizing social media in their advertising strategy and as this method proves to be more and more successful we begin to see new marketing techniques emerge that encompass both online and offline media. There are plenty of examples of brands that have used events and/or games with prizes to entice participation as...
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ARel: Nifty & Vexingly Undocumented
By Philip Champon Developer Team Lead
tl;dr Reference (examples and output, sans commentary)
Ambiguous column reference, what ever do you mean?
Ryan Bates was good enough to sneak in some hints on better ActiveRecord encapsulation in his excellent “Advanced Queries in Rails 3”. I began using #merge and #& immediately. Unfortunately, not all of our code was ready to live in an...
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The Most Social Super Bowl Yet
By Meghan Sharkey, Director of Marketing
The Super Bowl used to just be about football, but nowadays, the event has evolved into a high-stakes advertising game. Last year, at $3 million or so on a 30-second ad, the pressure was on to produce a campaign that would have a lasting effect long after the 30 seconds were over. Over the past few years, we...
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Adaptly Hackathon
By Sean Shillo, VP of Engineering
The Adaptly office was almost completely empty on December 23, 2011 with the exception of the developer team, a strong aroma of highland scotch in the air, and the excitement surrounding our first ever hackfest. The purpose of this friendly hackathon was to let our developer’s skills and creativity run loose with the guidelines of building something related to...
December 2011
5 posts
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Adaptly's What's Hot & What's Not List from 2011
By Meghan Sharkey, Director of Marketing
Lately, every time we browse the web we’ve come across another “What’s Hot and What’s Not” list from 2011. After reading several versions, we, at Adaptly decided to contribute our own opinion on what trends and products in social media are really “hot” and which ones are just not.
Stay tuned for more opinions next year…
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Some of Our Favorite Things from 2011…
By Meghan Sharkey, Director of Marketing
The holiday season is right around the corner! People are busy buying gifts for their loved ones, booking travel plans, baking holiday cookies, and of course searching for the perfect New Year’s Eve outfit. As this year quickly comes to an end, we, at Adaptly, didn’t want to welcome the New Year without recapping some of our favorite things from 2011...
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Yes, Something Really Does Look Different
By: Jessie Tseng, Designer at Adaptly
Imagine you’re the winner of one of those reality television shows—except you’re actually great at what you do, and you’re much less annoying. And just like any winner, the first you do after crying on stage and thanking your parents is to hire an image consultant and get made over. Because from this moment on, everyone is watching you.
...
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Social Does Not Equal Search
“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Nikhil Sethi, who is co-founder/CEO Adaptly.
As we look at the emergence of social as a serious contender within a typical media buy, the marketplace is noticing an evolution of the medium rather than the creation of yet...
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Introducing Adaptly Momentum: Combining Paid,...
By Nikhil Sethi, Co-founder & CEO
Social network advertising is like no other digital channel that we’ve ever seen before. Each social network is a platform on its own with a completely unique, non-standard ad experience. Standard ad banners are nowhere to be seen; instead, each platform has embraced integrated advertising with ad units based on how consumers experience each...
November 2011
1 post
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Adaptly Jumps the Pond, Expands to UK
It’s been a busy few months here at Adaptly and today we are proud to announce the opening of our new London office and expansion into Europe. This development marks our first initiative outside of the U.S. market and a major milestone for our company. As a part of our international expansion we are additionally announcing the appointment of Paul Turner as Head of EMEA at Adaptly. Paul has an...
September 2011
1 post
R.I.P. the Like
At today’s f8 conference, Facebook will introduce the successor to the ubiquitous “Like” button (Mashable wrote a good article on this). Now, instead of simply allowing users to endorse a product, developers will be able to create custom labels for their interactions. Beyond the new standard “Listened” or “Watched,” I’m excited to learn when my friend “tried out” a new product or “learned” a new...
July 2011
1 post
Go smaller, not bigger
One of the principal benefits to advertising in social media is the ability to target specific demographics of users based on interests. The level of choice on the part of the advertiser is revolutionary. Of course, these myriad options can quickly become overwhelming, and the job of the advertiser, to optimize the campaign, can become difficult.
To illustrate with an example, Facebook, which...
June 2011
1 post
Some Facebook impressions are more equal than...
Facebook (like most ad networks) does little to differentiate the impressions they serve. The network does not report much about the location (on the page) ads are served. And for very good (privacy) reasons, you will only get general aggregated information on demographics of users ads were served to.
This uniform treatment of impressions makes it easy to believe that all impressions on...
April 2011
2 posts
The Mystery of Hidden Auction Rules, PART 3
As you may recall, many social networks use a modified second-price auction system to determine allocation and cost of ads on their platform (winners have the highest bid, but only pay the bid of the second-highest bidder). Many people have analyzed the effects of known variations to the GSP auction system (including Mike Nolet’s interesting analysis into the effects of price floors). However,...
When Advertising Across Networks…
When creating a cross-platform advertising campaign, it is important to keep in mind the differences in psychologies of the different platforms. Facebook for example, is uniquely suited to develop fan pages, which allow for future user interaction. However, if you are trying to drive traffic to a video you are hoping will gain traction, Facebook may not be your best option.
To demonstrate...
March 2011
1 post
Social Ads and Psychophysics
The flexibility of social advertising presents an interesting opportunity for advertisers to determine apply new methodologies and test theories long held to be challenging to verify (eg. responsiveness of different demographics on small business ads). However, the new potential for discovery is not limited to advertising. The scale, reach, and variability of social ads appears to create an...
February 2011
2 posts
Four P's of social media advertising: What is an...
I am often asked what the proper steps are to creating a good social media advertising campaign. Most of these questions revolve around a similar theme: “Anthony, what does a good title/image/body look like?”
While this visible aspect of your ad is obviously important (after all, ads are no good if they don’t attract users’ attention), they are hardly the only important aspect of ads.
...
"I visit Facebook for the ads"
Did you watch the Super Bowl? Did you see the ads (Being a big Star Wars fan growing up, my favorite was the Volkswagen ad with the Darth Vader kid.)? Some people have observed the huge increase in social media involvement in social media ads. Many of the ads were available on Facebook pages well before they aired during the game. Unsurprisingly, I see this increased social media involvement in...
The Mystery of Hidden Auction Rules, PART 2
In the previous post, we outlined some of the reasons why auctions act as great mechanisms to match advertisers the proper advertising space. In particular, we discussed the GSP auction and discussed incentive compatibility. This time, we explore some of the reasons why networks may not wish to publish their rules:
Rules can be confusing to advertisers.
The implementation of social media ad...
January 2011
3 posts
The Mystery of Hidden Auction Rules, PART 1
As you use your favorite social network, you may wonder how it was decided which ads appear in front of you. There is a rich science behind this that I cannot possibly do justice with a few sentences, but I will give a brief overview for those who are unfamiliar: There are two main pricing models used in online advertising: CPC (cost per click) and CPM (cost per thousand impressions). Though...
Where is Advertising Going?
Hi all, I’m Anthony, and I’ll be posting my thoughts here every once in a while. Before I get ahead of myself though, here’s a bit about me: I grew up in sunny Saratoga, CA, and went to college at Caltech. In October of 2010 I joined Adaptly. The weather has been beautiful (especially for a native Californian who appreciates the contrast of his first real snow), and the intellectual...
October 2010
1 post
Offices Moved to NYC!
Poking our heads out to say hi to our NYC friends! Ping us for free lunch and crazy conversation. :)
nikhil@adapt.ly
July 2010
4 posts
Wouldn't that be sweet? : Mutating Ads
Continuation in the “Wouldn’t that be sweet?” blog series. In this series we detail interesting new ideas we’re thinking about at the Adaptly HQ.
Mutating Ads
Ads right now are very static. You create a facebook ad for example and it remains as that facebook ad unless you edit a specific part of it. Maybe you are tweaking the title, the body, the image, some targeting, or a budgeting option....
Wouldn’t that be sweet? : Performance Based...
Our second post in the “Wouldn’t that be sweet?” blog series. In this series we detail interesting new ideas we’re thinking about at the Adaptly HQ.
Performance Based Pricing
Software as a service products are created to improve the process or experience of a given problem. Whether it’s saving you time, money, headache etc. We believe these products should be judged (priced) based on...
There is Way Too Much Data, Not Enough Action.
I love data. I love looking at various large and small data sets, from the economy, to the environment, to my google analytics pages. Data is fascinating. It’s filled with deep insight into trends and patterns about what’s happening in a specific test. Whether you’re measuring the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere over time, or the number of people who clicked the red button over the green one on...
Wouldn't That Be Wweet? : Automatic A/B Testing
Today marks the first day of the “Wouldn’t that be sweet?” blog series. In this series we are going to be detailing interesting new ideas we’re thinking about at the Adaptly HQ.
Automatic A/B Testing
If you want to do some sort of A/B testing, it’s usually a very laborious task that involves setting up multiple pages, each page has the correct...
June 2010
1 post
Got an idea? Test it quickly.
There is a great post on how to test the validity of a new idea. We thought we would break down the essentials for you here.
The Landing Page
Firstly you’ll want to create a page that ideally describes your product, what you’re trying to achieve, and display some sort of call to action. The description should include a high level description of what you’re trying to do as well as any specifics...
May 2010
2 posts
Facebook Now Serving More Than 50 Billion Banner...
…In total, the social networking site displayed 176.3 billion ads during the period, for an average of better than 50 billion ads each month. That total represents 16.2% of the total number of banner ads served across the entire Web, and places the site ahead of the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft — the latter by nearly triple…
Full Article on Mashable
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April 2010
2 posts
What types of ads work best on social networks?
An interesting post from Mashable highlights what sort of ads work well on Social Networks. The answer is … it depends! What is the purpose of these ads?
If the purpose is to raise awareness, it might be sponsored content. This is because sponsored content if often not perceived as advertising. For example, Microsoft runs a lot of sponsored content with Technology Blogs such as Mashable, to...
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Facebook Ads to use Web History
According to http://bit.ly/cNebBL, Facebook Ads will start using your web history to deliver more targeted and relevant ads to you. Facebook Connect is developing into a rather strong platform, and this was a logical next step for Facebook. But how would this move benefit advertisers?
Facebook’s web history targetting depends on the user having shared content through Facebook Connect. This...