So hack day has come and gone.

It was fun and, no doubt, proved that even more time-saving, revenue increasing features could be added to make Direct Media Exchange that much more useful for our publishers.

The play-by-play follows, but I won't tell you the winner until the end of the article. Also note: these are merely mocked-up ideas. Technological hurdles or other constraints could hinder us from actually incorporating them into the application. They may make it in, and they may not. But appreciation goes out to all those who participated: these are some great, potential features for our platform.

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Creative Creator/Re-buy/Networking Tool
Team “Leaderboard” started the presentation: Brandon L. (SysOps), Cam M. (Support), Joe G.(Development) and myself.

Our mock-up and presentation introduced the idea of giving our publisher members a down-and-dirty ‘creatives creator’. With it, a publisher could create a house-ad for their own site within a minute (a house-ad is an ad that promotes your own website). It was codenamed “FlashDance”.

We also proposed that at a later phase, publishers might be able to do a “re-buy” where they could trade back a portion of their profits to the exchange to advertise with that creative within the exchange (this feature was codenamed “AdTango”). This also would be a great solution for very small publishers who haven't yet hit their minimums, and would rather advertise their site to increase traffic then just wait for organic growth to occur.

And a final phase would add in a widget that would display different member URLs in a display badge, codenamed “LinkHop” .

After garnering easily the longest laughter for a mocked-up creative we made as a homage to our Lead Developer, Joe “Garage” Gartska , we all thought for sure that our team was going to win.

Well, the best ideas were yet to come…

Frequency Cap Calculator

Team “Banners” (featuring Brad N. (Product Management), Jerri G. (Sales), Peter E.(SysOps), and Jon A. (Development), tackled a great idea: how to simplify frequency capping.

They presented a very clean mock-up of a frequency cap calculator.

Where a publisher would usually go in the “Manage Tab” to set frequency caps for a third party placement, a new ‘help’ link there would open up a widget whereby a publisher would merely need to enter in:

• a guess of their average daily fill impressions

• a guess of their daily unique visitors

…and the widget would give an estimate of what would be a good frequency cap for that placement. In addition, at a later phase, we would ping the publisher with information about increases in unique visitors on their sites. This alert would help them update their frequency caps further along the line.

This mock-up definitely elicited some “ooos” and “ahhs” amongst our colleagues. A great example of a utility that publishers might like to see. They received a healthy amount of applause.

Flex Charts

Team “Pop-ups”, arguably the quietest team in the competition, delivered one of the glitziest, flashiest mock-ups of the day. This team featured Eric A.(Development), Luke W.(Analysis), Trent D. (QA), and Mike M. (Lead Intern)

I do not exaggerate when I say that the whole room’s collective jaw dropped when their screen came up: cool, new reporting for the “Analyze Tab” !

Making use of certain technologies (’Adobe Flex’), they created new statistics charts for the reporting page for Direct Media Exchange. With a slick user interface, a publisher can more easily get summaries of Direct Media Exchange data, chronologically “zooming” in or out to see revenue increases, impression counts, and more. It's a neat way to check your stats. I really liked their idea. So did everybody else in the room.

Direct Media Exchange WordPress Plugin

Team “Skyscrapers” — Travis (Development), Shane (Support), Becca (Analysis) and Brian (Sysops) –followed with a fully functioning WordPress plugin for Direct Media Exchange!

By adding this plugin to your WordPress blog (a popular, open source platform for blogging), you can quickly add ads to your blog posts. Being a member of Direct Media Exchange, you simply supply your login and password, then add ’simplified’ tags and they'll show on your blog in between posts. Cool!

Also included is light reporting within your WordPress ‘admin’ section.

And you can even add a badge that shares your data on your blog site: just paste code into the sidebar. This is totally optional, of course, but many Direct Media Exchange users like to share their numbers.

Another presentation with a solid amount of applause. Plugins and widgets are something we’ve been considering for some time, so seeing this fully-functional ‘mock-up’ was exciting. Using WordPress both at work and at home, I was won over — this was the one I actually cast my ballot for in the voting at days end.

SMS Stats

Next, Team “Rectangles” came up with “Mobile stats via SMS”
Joe M. (Support), Pat M.(Business Development), Ellie S. (Dev), Edward W.(Dev)

Would you like to get your revenue numbers sent to your cellphone?

You’re at the bar, trying to impress someone…then your phones texts you with your daily increase in revenue, impressions, and more. Joe Matella’s solo explanation of this feature (including the actual SMS message ringing at just the right moment) wasn't just well scripted…it was the funniest stand-up routine/presentation we had all day. Great idea. Good fun.

Anchor Tool Exchange

The last team, the “Interstitials” (and if you hadn't guessed already, teams were named after creative sizes/ad types) included Dave B. (Project Mangement) Chuck D. (Development), Alex R. (SysOps) and Leland P. (Analysis).

They presented a functioning mock-up of a ‘networking’ widget they called “Anchor Tool Exchange (ATEX).

Everyone who has a website should be trying to better their SEO. And everyone knows the value of having back-links to websites. If you’re already a publisher on Direct Media Exchange, that presents a fascinating proposition — an inherent way for everyone to benefit from this membership of publishers. Merely click a radio button in your Direct Media Exchange account, add some ‘anchor text’ describing your website, put some code on a site, and a new text ad/link will display featuring one Direct Media Exchange website: a web page that your readers might be interested in checking out.

In addition, a weighting feature within the widget also plays an important role: the more “text links” you serve, the higher priority you get for your tags to be served elsewhere. A neat way to advertise your website AND better your search engine optimization. Everyone in the room was impressed.

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Who won you ask? Well, first off, we all quickly realized that any one of these ideas would be great to implement in the application (all of them, even!), but one of them had to be chosen as “number one”.

Here’s the final standings:

Fourth Place TIE):

Team “Interstitials” with “ATEX” networking widget
and
Team “Banners” with “Frequency Cap Calculator”

Third Place(TIE):

Team Rectangles with “RMXD mobile stats”
and
Team “Leaderboard” with FlashDance/AdTango/AdFire

Second Place : Team SkyScrpapers with “RMXD WordPress Plugin”

First Place : Team Popups with “Flex Charts”

Which of these would you like to see as new features in Direct Media Exchange? Let us know.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 11:57 am and is filed under Direct Media Exchange. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.