Advertising and Content Sponsorship Technology
System 7 provides publishers with comprehensive functionality for operating revenue-generating online advertising and site
sponsorship services. Sophisticated functionality can scale to the most demanding high traffic and high revenue publications,
but can be operated by non-technical advertising sales staff.
Basic Advertising Facilities
An advertising server is supplied as a System 7 module that can serve advertising to both System 7 publications
and third party websites. The server can also be used as an intermediary advertising server, that enables publishers
to track the impressions and clickthroughs delivered to adverts served by popular third party online advertising services
such as Doubleclick on behalf of customers. The server organises advertising hierarchically by campaigns, adverts
and deployments, enabling advertising staff to efficiently operate large books and quickly drill down to
impression and clickthrough statistics. A feature is provided that enables advertising staff to provide
advertisers with cut-down reporting pages that assist with customer relationship management.
Adverts can be quickly and flexibly deployed to System 7 publications by sales staff. Sales simply
visit the relevant part of a publication inside its administration website and press a button to deploy the
desired type of advert - such as a banner, button, inline advert or overlay - and System 7 then dynamically
integrates the material that they have supplied. Adding an advert in this way creates a virtual billboard
on a node that can be shared on a rotation system by more than one advert. Each billboard
is automatically inherited by any nodes that exist below it in the website structure, and replaces
billboards that may have been created on higher nodes.
Smart Impression Distribution
On publications that operate large advertising books, the manual distribution of advertising and the configuration
of advert rotations can prove inefficient. Advertising is sold to customers in blocks of impressions, often
numbering hundreds of thousands. Inefficiencies arise because advertising sales must regularly check
within their advertising server to determine when adverts have received the numbers of impressions sold, and
then manually update advertising rotations to distribute impressions between different adverts so
that none exceeds their targets.
In practice sales staff must balance their time between administration of existing sales and winning new business.
Because limited time is available for monitoring the number of impressions received by adverts, adverts often receive
20% or more impressions than have been sold. On high turnover publications, this means that substantial money is
being left on the table.
Using the SID (Smart Impression Distribution) feature, advertising sales can avoid this problem. When the SID feature
is turned on, advertising is assigned to publications in a different way. At the time that advertising sales staff deploy
new adverts to a publication, they simply specifiy how many impressions have been sold and how quickly they should be delivered.
SID then automatically manages the different advertising rotations in order to optimally distribute impressions between
the adverts, and can automatically draw new advertising from a special excess list when existing targets have been met.
Site Sponsorship Services
When System 7 skins are created for new publications, they can take advantage of a site sponsorship feature. This makes
it possible to use the administration website to assign sponsors to specific sections and even articles in a publication.
Numerous features are provided, enabling the display of sponsor logos, the assignment of special graphical styles
to sponsored content (through CSS style sheets) and the highlighting of sponsored channels in the channels bar.
Despite the relative simplicity of site sponsorship services when compared with traditional online advertising,
site sponsorship is driving an increasing proportion of revenues for publishers.
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