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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 of this behavior would provide immense value to advertisers (number one on our list of priorities!) by increasing both performance and engagement. The design of a real-time event driven campaign system also presents a significant engineering challenge, which naturally provokes our interest. 

Our application has reached a level of maturity that now enables us to tackle some of these problems and begin to solve them in a highly scalable way. 

What better event to start experimenting our new technology with than the Super Bowl?! We proposed the idea to some of our advertisers and quickly found a partner who was equally as interested. And so it began…

Specific Example:

Manning throws a touchdown ›› Activate Giants touchdown copy and positive Manning copy ›› 10 minutes pass or NE score ›› Pause Giants touchdown copy and positive Manning copy

Our approach was to think of each event as an object. Each event has its own (set or dynamic) definition as well as a (fixed or variable) lifetime to consider. These events also have defined “trigger” criteria that could be a number of things including some specific signal from a data source, a time, or a manual indication. Additionally, each event could also have defined “suspension” criteria. 

Some Key Takeaways:

1.    The copy with just general Super Bowl context did not perform any better than the baseline Pepsi Max copy.

2.    The more specific the copy, the better performance we saw both in terms of CTR and cost per metrics.

3.    Copy that directly referenced a proper entity, such as one of the individual players was highly relevant due to its more precise triggering. It was also more effective than copy running against a certain set point in the game (kickoff, halftime, 4th quarter).

4.    Amongst the time specific event ads, the 4th quarter clearly performed better. This significant change can be attributed to the increase in tension and excitement around this game’s final quarter. 

For Adaptly, the Super Bowl is an especially significant time. It is one of the few reminders that creating a coveted experience with paid advertising IS possible. Brands and their respective agencies invest significant amounts of time, money, and effort leading up to and during their short commercial spotlight to the effect that Super Bowl commercials have in turn increased their own value by helping drive Super Bowl viewership.

This is important.

Social is the only digital medium where it is possible to provide this same type of experience. Recreating the anticipation, the excitement, the buzz regularly with your social audience, as is done every year with the Super Bowl paid ads, is a challenge. Further, attempting to do it on a global scale and consistently is nearly impossible. Rest assured, that’s what Adaptly is here to do; this is why we imagine and implement new technologies like an event driven ad system—to chip away at this colossal problem, to provide a solution and most importantly, to deliver your value.

There is much work to be done, until next time.

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 three seats and requires a deeper understanding of the World Wide Web and how users seek information on it.

With time we began to see the rise of the digital landscape and new ways in which marketers could better utilize it for their advertising initiatives. Digital eventually separated into two categories: Search and Display. Display advertising is more contextually based and targets users by content, interests, and topics. On the other hand, search advertising enables text ads to be displayed in search results when triggered by certain keywords.

Now with the evolution of social media, we see a fifth seat appear at the advertising roundtable: Social. A big misconception is that social falls under the digital umbrella when in reality social is its own unique advertising medium and deserves its own chair at the table. Social encompasses the same paid media (ie. clicks, impressions, CTR) component as digital but also works with earned and owned channels as well.

Whereas digital advertising is concerned with the consumer’s immediate action and behavior, social focuses on consumer engagement and continuous interaction with the brand. In order to effectively advertise across social networks, marketers need to create a strategy to engage the consumer and continue the conversation. Social advertising can be looked at as a conversation between the consumer and the brand, an ongoing dialogue with constant feedback from both ends. Digital advertising is comparable to a one-way street of information with no room for consumer feedback. Thus, social is its own separate advertising entity and should be seen as and treated as such. 

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 means to drive fans to their Facebook page or increase their number of followers on Twitter. However, the big question that remains is are these brands thinking about their social strategy correctly? Simply increasing the number of fans that like your page is only beneficial if you are attracting the right audiences and have a plan to facilitate engagement.

Let’s take a look at a recent campaign that incorporated a social component into both their online and offline media efforts, The Bud Light You Call It Playoffs. This campaign began on January 7^th and ended on January 22^nd of this year. It was themed around the playoff games for the Super Bowl XLVI and essentially allowed participants to guess the “Winning Plays” of each playoff game for a chance to win one of the many prizes being offered. Bud Light used both their TV and Print ads to direct people to an online URL with instructions to register. The interesting thing about this campaign, is the landing page of the website forced users to login through their Facebook account in order to participate. Furthermore, once you login you are then asked to “Like” Bud Light’s page before you are able to proceed any further. Bud Light utilized its offline media presence to directly drive people to a social network.

This Bud Light You Call It Playoffs campaign is a great example of how brands are experimenting with new marketing techniques that incorporate a social element. As marketers, we are absolutely still in this trial-and-error stage of determining what advertising strategies work best on social networks. However, one thing we can be confident in is how crucial it is to target the audience that is most likely to engage with your brand. Driving fans to your Facebook page is pointless if there is no follow up plan to continuously engage these people by interacting with them regularly. Acquiring fair-weathered fans by bribes or sweepstakes is useless as they are more likely to “Unlike” your page or hide the content following the completion of the game/challenge/event that originally enticed them. Marketers should consider the value of leveraging their current fan base to build an authentic community who will continue to engage with the brand long after the campaign is over.   

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 encapsulated world. Quite often, I found myself with SQL errors, because columns were referenced  as symbols and ActiveRecord failed to qualify the name space… ActiveRecord only converts symbols in finder methods (find* and #where) to canonically named columns. Any #group, #having, #select, or #order symbols will burn you sooner or later, particularly if they’re part of a scope.

I began solving this on my own, by using the #arel_table class method within my model scopes. As far as piecemeal solutions went, this kept me happy… But I wanted to share the joy with my co-workers and I couldn’t justifiably ask them to read ARel code and tests (since ARel mostly lacks anything nearing useful documentation). I was forced to finally make a presentation…

Ambiguous column references in scopes can be merged into other queries.

The following snippet is a valid scope. It exemplifies the shortsighted tendencies a lot of Rails models assume. Once you attempt to merge this with another model, you’ll find your SQL server returning an ambiguous column reference.

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  scope :with_id, select(:id)
end
  => SELECT id FROM "<T>"

class Category < ActiveRecord::Base
  scope :with_product, joins(:products).merge Product.with_id
end
  => SELECT id FROM "categories" INNER JOIN "products" ON "products"."category_id" = "categories"."id"

Better encapsulation yields more reusable and saner code. This can be rectified by hardcoding the table name, using the #table_name class method, or accessing the symbol via the #arel_table class method.

I’m partial to the arel_table method, because it gives you an Arel::Table object, which is very powerful. Aside from canonically naming the field for you, ARel will also correctly quote the name for each database engine you use. 

select("<T>.id")
  => SELECT <T>.id FROM "<T>"

select("#{table_name}.id")
  => SELECT <T>.id FROM "<T>"

select(arel_table[:id])
  => SELECT "<T>"."id" FROM "<T>"

Ambiguous and ugly

def self.cheaper_than(price)
  where("price < ?", price)
end
  => SELECT * FROM "<T>" WHERE price < N

This method is ambiguous and it can be more easily written using ARel’s relational algebra. ARel supports many predicates, including eq, not_eq, in, not_in, matches (LIKE or ILIKE in PgSQL), does_not_match (NOT LIKE or NOT ILIKE in PgSQL), gt, gteq, lt, and lteq. Each of the aforementioned predicates also supports _any and _all suffixes, adding AND and OR support for arrays.

def self.cheaper_than(price)
  where(arel_table[:price].lt(price))
end
  => SELECT * FROM "<T>" WHERE "<T>"."price" < N

scope :order_id_asc, order(arel_table[:id].asc)
  => ORDER BY "<T>"."id" ASC

scope :order_id_desc, order(arel_table[:id].desc)
  => ORDER BY "<T>"."id" DESC

scope :order_name_ci, order(arel_table[:name].lower)
  => ORDER BY LOWER("<T>"."name")

When using aggregate functions the results, in the SELECT, is aliased as function_id. This is true for all of the aggregates except count, which will remain unaliased, by default.

scope :avg_cost, arel_table[:cost].average
  => SELECT AVG("<T>"."cost") as avg_id FROM "<T>"
scope :avg_cost, arel_table[:cost].average.as(:avg)
  => SELECT AVG("<T>"."cost") as avg FROM "<T>"

scope :count_cost, arel_table[:cost].count 
  => SELECT COUNT("<T>"."cost") FROM "<T>"
scope :count_cost, arel_table[:cost].count.as(:count) 
  => SELECT COUNT("<T>"."cost") AS count FROM "<T>"

Also, when using multiplication or division infix operators you can alias the results, but you cannot alias addition or subtraction results. Furthermore, there are no infix operators for SQL bitwise operations.

scope :add_n1_n2, arel_table[:n1] + arel_table[:n2]
scope :mul_n1_n2, arel_table[:n1] * arel_table[:n2].as "foo"

scope :order_id_asc, arel_table.grouping(arel_table[:id].gt(1).and(arel_table[:n1].gt(1))
  => SELECT * FROM "<T>" WHERE ("<T>"."id" > 1 AND "<T>"."n1" > 1)

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 are beginning to see a new trend emerge in Super Bowl commercials; a large majority of these advertisements include a strong social media component. According to Lightspeed Research, last year it was estimated that:

•  Nearly two-thirds of 18-34 year-olds planning to watch the Super Bowl have smartphones and intended to use them while watching the game
•  Additionally, almost a third (32%) of these viewers will be posting comments about the game on a social network

This year it can be expected that more people than ever will be watching the game with one eye glued to some social network throughout it all. Let’s review some of the social media highlights from the 2011 Super Bowl game.

•  Christina Aguilera opening the game with the National Anthem and forgetting a few words in the beginning verses became a fast trending topic on Twitter.
• According to BrandBowl2011, the top commercial was Chrysler with a total of 32,514 tweets. However, the Doritos commercial was the most talked about with an overwhelming 34,063 tweets and the most loved ad was Volkswagon’s “The Force” commercial with a sentiment ranking of +32.1%.
• Mercedes-Benz “The World’s First Twitter-Fueled Race” was a campaign first promoted on Mercedes Facebook page and challenged fans to try and accrue the most Twitter followers and Facebook “likes” during a race to Dallas. The team with the most social media tallies won a Mercedes Benz 2012 C-Class Coupe.
•  Foursquare launching its first ever-global venue allowing fans to check-in to The Super Bowl. This campaign seemed like a great idea until Foursquare experienced several server errors preventing people from checking-in until the second half of the game. In the end, there was a total of 187,281 Super Bowl check-ins.

Now you might be wondering what is the best social media approach to advertising for this year’s Super Bowl? Mashable outlines five of their top social media game plans for the most effective reach.

1. Establish a Real-Time Narrative: Creating user generated content (UGC) has proven to be a great success for brands like Frito-Lay and Mercedes. These brands start their campaigns in September and encourage users to interact by creating and voting on different ads for the big game.
2. Turn It Into a Game:  In the months leading up to the game, brands should entice fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter to guess the plot for different ad spots or hype secret messages within them. Brands can then reward these users for their engagement.
3. Release a Tie-In App: Develop an app based on the ad will help to give your Super Bowl campaign life in social media. This method is not widely used but if done correctly it has the potential to reap major benefits.
4. Advertise the Ad: Similar to a teaser for a movie, brands should consider hyping their Super Bowl ad by tweeting about it beforehand and getting people excited to see it.
5.  Just Throw It on YouTube: This tactic is very new and somewhat untested. Last year, Volkswagon’s “The Force” commercial was posted on YouTube days before the game and within the first 48 hours had 1.5 million viewers and was a trending topic on Twitter.

The 2012 game will be the most social Super Bowl to date and marketers would be smart to keep that in mind when creating their campaigns for the big day. Looking forward to watching a great game!

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 both social media and advertising. 

Our goal was to evaluate the number of public fans of a current page on Facebook and then rank them by their level of influence. A fan’s influence is measured by his ability to affect other users. Thus, not all fans of a page are created equal, and given equal prices for fans, certain demographics are preferred over others for long term engagement with a page, brand, etc.

Due to time constraints the Klout score was chosen as the best way to measure a person’s social influence. The biggest challenge with using Klout is the API is searchable by Twitter handle and not Facebook user.

Our first approach to linking the Twitter users to Facebook users was to assess the information of all of the active people on a Facebook page. Based on each person’s name, username and location, we were able to use the Twitter search API to match up these fields and make the connection. This method seemed efficient until the rate limiting started. Undeterred, we resorted to Google and issued a search of a person’s name constrained to the Twitter domain. A little regex magic produced a list of possible Twitter usernames, providing us with the relevant information needed to connect the Twitter and Facebook accounts.

There are certainly many concerns and questions with the approaches used and assumptions made here. The main deal breaker assumption is that the fan subset found will have a valid representation of the whole set. There is also the reliance of the Klout metric.

In the end it was felt that with assumptions holding, the project would give the ability to chose a certain demographic of fans against another all others things being equal. It should be noted that all information gathered was public. Next up on the hackfest list:

Backend language shootout - Scala, Clojure, Ruby, Go, Python, there can only be one
Big Data Madness  (AKA how do I crash postgres) - HBase, Mongo, Cassandra, or Riak
Hadoop Shadoop - To insert or to log and parse

Tools Used:
Heroku
Postgres
Ruby on Rails 3.1
Relevant Gems: koala, klout-rb, resque, geocoder, twitter, mechanize

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…

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 first.  Needless to say this list includes raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens to name a few. In addition to brown paper packages tied up with strings, Adaptly’s favorite things from the year 2011 include…

1.     Our new office located at 40 W. 23rd Street – stop by and say hi sometime! 

2.     Will and Kate getting hitched – The Royal Wedding

3.     The collaboration of our favorite PR team, Brew Media Relations – great people!

4.     The premiere of the new hit Showtime series Homeland – re-watch the first season on Monday’s at 8pm

5.     The world not coming to an end on May 21st

6.     This awesome new social media metric called Momentum – learn more about it http://adaptly.com/momentum

7.     The new ABC hit show Once Upon a Time – Sunday nights at 8pm (some say best show out there!)

8.     A balanced ratio of males to females in the Adaptly office… finally!

9.     The new Timeline feature on Facebook – we’ve all updated our accounts, have you?

10.   Opening an office in the UK with Paul Turner - Adaptly’s gone global!

11.   The increase in people’s awareness of the power of social media. Companies are now realizing how social media can help to market a brand – learn how Adaptly can help you advertise across the social web www.adaptly.com

Happy Holidays from Adaptly!

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.

That’s kind of how we feel. In the least arrogant way possible. But if you’ve been following Adaptly over the last year, you’ll know we’ve become kind of a big deal. And while we’re nowhere as attractive as Kelly Clarkson is now, we, too, have begun looking in the mirror to see what needs updating. 

The first thing we wanted to address was our blog. The goal for this blog is to be the go-to place for updates about our company. “Where we talk about our favorite topic: ourselves” isn’t just us being a little cheeky (although it is that). This blog is not only our public face; it is also the main way for us to communicate with our audience. So if we’re sending people to this page, it would follow that this page needs to look good. 

So we made it look good. 

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“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 another new channel (e.g. video, mobile, etc.). Looking at the four seats of advertising we have our three traditional seats (Radio, TV, Print) and of significant importance in the past decade (Digital). Traditional media has always suffered from the untraceable nature of the beast, whereas Digital, by means of Display, and Search primarily has built itself on its trackable nature, put simply the ability to cookie.

And here comes Social.

Emerging truly as a digital vehicle (meaning it plays in the overarching web and mobile space), Social has presented itself as the FIFTH seat. It ignores most concepts that Digital has been born with. It plays kindly with the traditional metrics (clicks, impressions, CTR), but also embodies a very new idea around conversation, dialogue, and response metrics - creating value in an owned and earned media sense.

The game is not only about distribution anymore, it is now 1 part distribution, 2 parts
engagement.

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