While every publisher has their own reasons, here are a few we’ve heard from our clients about how adOS meets their needs better than DFP:

adOS is user-friendly.

The DFP platform can be difficult to learn as a beginner, and even long-time users can get bogged down by its endless menus and configuration options. By contrast, we designed the adOS app specifically around publishers’ workflows, and we test it regularly with publishers and ad networks to make sure it still meets their needs. We also use the website feedback tool Usabilla to gather information from our users while they use the app.

adOS is client focused.

One size never fits all, and for publishers with custom needs (such as a customizable user interface, or the ability to serve ads direct from an API call), DFP wasn’t always able to come through. By contrast, Adzerk not only pays attention to our clients’ business objectives, we build features and give consultations that help them meet their goals. There’s a reason why our platform is called adOS, because we build the tools to enable publishers to serve their ads the way they want to.

adOS is well supported.

For small publishers, DFP offers no support at all. Since all publishers, big or small, have different support needs, adOS offers robust documentation for free, plus different levels of support to meet different needs. An Adzerk client will never pay for support they don’t use, or go without support because there’s no affordable option.

This comparison shows some of the ways adOS stacks up to DFP, and some of the ways that it excels:

Like what you see so far? Why not test out an account for free, or ask for more information? We’re always ready to help out!

The post Ad Server Comparison: Doubleclick for Publishers (DFP) vs. Adzerk appeared first on Adzerk.

In February, I joined the Adzerk team as a Senior Software Engineer. Our CTO, Nate, and I had briefly worked together in the past and I’d been watching what Adzerk was up to since James started the company. After a stint at a larger organization, I was really excited to get back to a startup, particularly one going through as much growth as Adzerk. I’ve spent the last few months getting up to speed on the business and the industry, working with customers, and building a few features. Now, I’m excited to dive in to some of the bigger challenges Adzerk is facing.

We’re at an interesting moment in Adzerk’s history right now, but not just because of the growth of our customers or traffic. We are growing a company culture. That culture will influence everything from our office environment, to how we hire, how we plan work, and certainly the kind of projects we undertake. We are working deliberately to design this culture and answer the many questions that come along with it. For instance, as engineers, we have to find a process that allows time for us to work on long term projects, but doesn’t stop us from helping our current customers accomplish their goals. And as we build new features, we have to find a way to iterate on our platform very quickly without impacting the stability of our core service.

Solving all of these problems means we have to learn how to juggle. We have to create an environment that is fun and relaxed, but also relentlessly efficient. We have to interview people in a way that is rigorous, but allows us to get know them as more than the answer to test questions. Every facet of our work provides these seemingly contradictory goals. We are juggling all these goals, trying not to let any of them fall to the floor. And not only do we have to answer these questions for ourselves, but we have to find answers for the team. We have to learn to juggle together. And that is really the foundation of the Adzerk company culture: trusting each other and working together to find the right alignment for the company and the team.

I’m excited watch our culture grow from this foundation. I’m excited to see what balances we end up with.

If you want to talk about cultures, functional programming, or heavy metal, I’m your man. I live and work in Durham with the rest of Adzerk, so locals can find me lazing around outside our many bars and eateries. I’ll also be representing Adzerk at RICON East in NYC next week!

The post Growing up (and out) appeared first on Adzerk.

When you are a startup in Durham, NC and raising money it means you are on the road – and on the road in a totally different way. I mix up 3-4 day trips to the west coast with 1-2 day trips to NYC throughout the year. I like to think I have gotten particularly good at perfecting the one day trip to NYC and I wanted to lay out what I have learned. (I am writing this on the plane from RDU to LGA)

Rule #1. Kudos to Brian Handley for drilling this into me. You are a startup, your time and your money are your most valuable assets. Do not take a trip unless you have at least 3 meetings/day lined up. (and it should be 5 meetings a day). If you fly out of Raleigh on the 6am flight you land in NYC at 7:30, a cab or subway ride gets you into the city by 8:00/8:30. You can have breakfast lined up at 9, a meeting before lunch at 10:30/11:00, a lunch meeting at 12:30, an afternoon meeting at 2:00 and a final regular meeting at 4:00. You can then line up dinner or a drink at 5:30/6:00 or go ahead and head back to the airport (it is a long day). It’s not always possible to line up the perfect schedule – for instance here is my schedule for today:

8:00 Get to NYC
10:00 Breakfast with an Advisor
1:00 Investor Meeting
2:00 Client Meeting
3:00 Partner Meeting

Not enough in the morning and the meetings in the afternoon don’t have as much time between them as I would like. (I am trying to move the 3:00 meeting to 4:00 and will probably have dinner/drinks lined up by the end of the day.

Rule #2. Learn to use public transportation and your feet – most times in NYC I either don’t take a cab or I take a cab to and from Laguardia and that’s it. It’s faster and cheaper. I have cards in my wallet for subways in NYC, Chicago, Boston, and SF.

Rule #3. Bring the right gear.

1. 13″ Retina MBP – When I started writing this post I was using a 11″ MacBook Air – but when the 13″ retina came out I realized I could consolidate both of my computers into one. No more hauling around an 11″ Air for travel and a 15″ MBP for the office.

2. iPhone w/ headphones and charger.

3. Mophios Battery Pack for charging iPhone/iPad (especially for day trips). I use my iPhone for directions, calendar, and boarding passes. If it dies I am in deep shit.

4. Better headphones – iPhone headphones are terrible for a plane but cheap sennheiser headphones are compact and work great on a plane.

5. iPad – I recently bought an iPad exclusively for making it easier to share presentations – there are connectors for HDMI and VGA and plenty of times you can just hand it over while having coffee and let them flip through.

6. Business cards and stickers – give them to anyone and everyone who will take one.

7. Moleskin notebook and pen – perfect size for taking notes in meetings and freehand on the plane.

8. Dead tree book – for those annoying 20-30 minutes of take off and landing when you can’t use all these swanky technical devices. Currently reading Crossing the Chasm.

9. Verizon Hotspot and charger – most important, you need internet in the airport, restaurants, coffee shops, and sometimes when you are sitting at a major VCs board table and they don’t know the password for their WiFi or their internet sucks.

If you do have to stay the night use a mix of Hipmunk and Hotwire to get a dirt cheap hotel – you aren’t having a romantic weekend with the wife so no need to stay at the W… you should have seen the place we stayed at last week in NYC. It was like someone built an Alabama Motel 6 on the roof of a building in Hells Kitchen.

I talk to so many local entrepreneurs who complain about the local fundraising scene – well get off your ass and get to where the money is. It’s easier and cheaper then you think.

The post Mastering the Day Trip appeared first on Adzerk.

Written by Devin Kelley, Director of Client Services at Method Savvy and formerly of BlogAds, this white paper focuses on giving you actionable steps for more a more productive day of email selling.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Everyone’s day has a rhythm. Surely yours does too. Maybe it’s come in early, answer some emails before attending a couple of meetings. You squeeze in some heads down work before heading to lunch. After lunch it’s catch up on the morning’s emails and so on…

What would happen if you answered emails instead of mid morning meetings? Would response times to potential clients be faster? Would faster response times mean quicker decisions? To find out; give it a try.”

You can download the paper here, or browse our Ad Serving Resource Center for more white papers, including our Ad Ops 101 Series!

The post 3 Strategies for Better Email Selling for Publishers appeared first on Adzerk.

While we’ve made changes to help de-mystify this process (see our post on ad server status messaging improvements), we’ve always wanted to be able to serve an ad the second that the flight is saved or set to begin. This week, we’re rolling out some changes that will allow us to do exactly that!

How it works

Everything works exactly the same from the user interface perspective. You will create campaigns, configure targeting options, and upload creatives in exactly the same way.

So what’s actually different?

Scheduled flights will now start instantly at the time they are scheduled. If a flight is scheduled to go out at 12am EST, it will now be prepared early (pre-balanced) so that it can begin exactly at 12am.

Flights that are not scheduled in advance will still take up to 30 minutes to start.

Questions?
We welcome questions and feedback! If you have something to say, let us know.

The post Instant Scheduled Start appeared first on Adzerk.

If you have worked in sales in any capacity, you know a lot goes into the sales efforts.  Things such as qualifying information needed, demo decks, general pricing sheets, pricing proposals, good referrals, contracts, etc.  Having all of this information can get lost in the shuffle and wind up hurting your sales efforts.  We hit that point and have slowly started getting everything into one big sales playbook so I can streamline my current process and make it easier for me to train new sales staff as we continue to grow.

Here is the general outline we used after doing some research on different iterations:

1. Corporate information – highlights company past, headquarters, milestones, etc.
2. Sales pitch – highlight why customers choose your product over competitors
3. Elevator pitch
4. Market space – define what the market space looks like and how your product fits into it
5. Recent trends – highlight the trends in the market place including current pricing models, contract terms, new companies, etc.
6. Target customers – clearly define the customers that tend to be the best fit for your product including their annual revenue, what product they may be using today, site traffic, etc.
7. Types of buyers – high level run down of who buys your product
8. Features and benefits – build a full spreadsheet that highlights each and every feature of your product along with why that feature is important and how it will benefit your target customer (we used the Gold Medal & German Shepard approach from the book ‘Question Based Selling’)
9. List of references – it is important to know who you can count on when working with a new customer, so have a full list of references with their contact info readily available.  it is important to have multiple references for each target customer, if there are more than one
10. Sales process – define the high level process of what a sale looks like (intro call, demo, calls and emails in between, contract, close, etc.)
11. CRM process – it is important to know that the information and data in your CRM is accurate for reporting and forecasting purposes, so clearly defining  a CRM process is extremely important when you grow.
12. Competitors and differentiators – Name all competitors and how you differentiate from each one
13. Objection handling – List out all the objections you are bound to face and how to handle it so it can be a repeatable process.
14. Glossary

The good part about going through this exercise was it helped me realize what the benefits of Adzerk are along with being able to build up the valuable material that we didn’t have for future sales efforts like white papers, case studies and other general marketing material that should be the norm.

Since starting the document 2 months ago, we have already gone through a couple different iterations and constantly add more material to it.  This has become a huge asset to me and one that will keep getting better as time goes on and our sales team has grown.

I am always open to feedback and hearing what else other start ups have done to grow their sales efforts.  Best of luck and happy selling!

-Ron

The post Building a Sales Playbook appeared first on Adzerk.

Most publisher-side ad servers are built to cater to a fixed placement on a page, and rotate banners to this placement regardless of external events. This makes it difficult for publishers to migrate over to a responsive design and serve ads that don’t break their layout.

Given that 2013 is the “year of the responsive design”, the ad world will be seeing more publishers and advertisers catering to responsive design, and ad servers will need to keep up.

At Adzerk, we’re already coming up with ways for our publishers to serve responsive ads that don’t involve massive workarounds or dozens of lines of code. We developed a modification to our ad code, which will serve ads depending on the size of a user’s browser window.

While this method takes a bit of manual code adjustment, we’re developing new ways to create responsive placements that will be intuitive enough that publishers never have to touch the ad code after they generate it from the app.

If you’ve been serving ads in a responsive environment (or have been trying) and are curious about what adOS is capable of, give us a heads up and we’ll be happy to discuss our solutions.

The post Using An Ad Server For Responsive Design appeared first on Adzerk.

We’re definitely looking forward to the next time we can host an event at the Adzerk office. Subscribe to our blogs, like our Facebook page, or follow us on Twitter to get updates about future events and meetups.

The post Adzerk Office Party Wrap-Up appeared first on Adzerk.

• Attendees at ad:tech SF 2013 are most likely to work for companies that identify themselves as Advertisers.
• Almost have of people who have been to ad:tech before will be attending this year.
• 12% of people aren’t actually attending the conference, but are hanging around for the networking.
• Attendees are most likely to identify themselves as working in Marketing & Communications.
• A majority think that networking is the best part of the conference, even better than the talks, sessions, or parties.
• A full 2/3rds of responders will attend the Networking Pub Crawl on Day 1.
• While most didn’t attend a party last year, AppNexus was voted the best party. Check out this year’s parties here. Maybe we’ll see you there!

And the Winner is. . .
In exchange for filling out our survey we offered participants a chance to win a pair of Giant’s tickets. Brittney Beussink of Reply, Inc. is our winner. Congrats, Brittney!

The post The ad:tech Interest Survey Results appeared first on Adzerk.

Read more here.

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