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Playing a small part in something BIG

Posted on May 21, 2009 by Tim
Filed Under Technology |

So, the call came in late last Friday afternoon. 

A major site launch of a confidential nature needed some support in terms of being able to deliver advertising for a major sponsor who had booked banners and pre-roll advertising but had no capability to serve such.  The production company involved in the creation of the site (and TV programming) knew our CEO.

“We serve ads, we could do it”.  Promises were made…the site launched Monday…the weekend was cancelled.

OpenX (formerly OpenAds) saved the day.  I don’t care what agencies think about the reputation of DoubleClick (which we also use) versus open source alternatives - in terms of flexibility and knowing that we could serve out what has turned out to be several million more ads for no additional ’service’ fees there was only one choice.

The only real challenge to setting up a new ‘website/publisher’ and campaign, then loading up the 3rd party ad tags and giving the web developer the invocation code to use was that the campaign booked was only to be served to US viewers.  The advertiser turned out to be Ally Bank (formerly GMAC) - a major US financial institution.  The solution was adding MaxMind’s GEOIP database, which I’d used in the past, and added the functionality to our installation at interactive investor relatively easily.

Pre-roll video advertising was solved by using the LongTail Video (JW Player) plugin: Adtonomy ; their choice of JW Player to display the production company’s FLV files was a good one.  Very flexible. I like it a lot and am currently exploring swapping out the player we use for iBall and Moneywise to it.

So, by Sunday evening it was all done and tested.  A signed NDA later, I’d had some exclusive access to what was to become a global story on Tuesday afternoon and was deemed to be of such scientific importance that Google dedicated their home page to it.  Not in to fossils myself, but it’s certainly got some attention.

So, just every now and then something is thrown at you which ends up being quite an honour to play a small part in.  What IDA would have thought of it all is anyone’s guess.  The site: www.revealingthelink.com  - (no, you won’t see my handy work unless you’re in the US)

 
Now to talk to our head of infrastructure and inform him where all the bandwidth has gone. Mark, its your problem now ;)

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