Burt blog

Display Ads: How to Bring the Sexy Back

A couple of weeks ago in Olso, INMA held an AdOps conference. Gustav von Sydow, Burt Founder and CEO, was invited together with Ted Persson, Founder and CCO at Great Works, to give a kick-ass inspirational talk to provoke thought and a creative conversation. The audience of media techy AdOps guys got to hear a talk about why the agency folks don’t care much for the digital display environment. And what can be done about it. How to bring the sexy back, as it were.

It’s a novel approach really - looking at the digital media from a creative agency’s perspective. It’s not unheard of, but it’s certainly been neglected during the recent era of digital marketing development. The audiences have been steadily shifting to consuming online services for years, but as long as the most creative people of the industry aren’t crazy about working on digital content no big brands are prepared to follow. 

So, how do we win the creatives over to online media? Gustav and Ted propose that media owners need to start focusing on the people creating the online content. They urge the media companies to work on their digital stand and raise the quality and the status of it in order to trigger higher creativity and a bigger slice of the brand advertisement budgets. 

For more see the video above.

We’ve been using Cassandra more and more lately. It’s pretty good write-wise, but it isn’t a very verbose Database and it’s bothering me. Here’s a transcript of a little conversation we had over SSH, nodetool and DataStax OpsCenter recently. No data was harmed in the recording of this incident. 

As appeared in Digiday on October 22nd

If you’ve read any of the trades recently, you’ve heard the buzz about native advertising and its promise of improved engagement.

Discussions, fueled largely in part by Facebook’s introduction of sponsored stories and Twitter’s promoted tweets, have pushed the case for native’s importance beyond the usual advertising technology circles into broader channels like Business Insider, TechCrunch and publications that typically cover a more holistic beat.

So why, all of a sudden, is native the topic du jour with the marketing cognoscenti? One might argue it’s because we, on both sides of the advertising/publishing aisle, are coming around to the notion that developing a robust advertising business calls for a lot more than simply building a massive audience and filling pages with ads where few users would ever think to look. Advertising needs to have an impact if it’s going to be effective, and a proven way to create such impact and effectiveness is to make ads an integrated — or native — part of the user experience.

Yet another great read by our VP of Product Development, Carl Nelvig. This time he takes on the ongoing discussion about misconceptions of the premium. 

“Let’s face it. We’re an industry that loves a good buzzword. We latch on to certain terms as if our careers – our very lives – depended on it. A couple of industry visionaries get to talking about some trend and we seize on it like it’s Gospel. Next thing you know, lunch tables and water coolers around the industry are abuzz with what promises to be the next big thing.

However of all the buzzwords we hear (and admittedly incorporate into our lexicon), perhaps the most trite and overused is ‘premium’. Premium gets bandied about like a Justin Bieber song lyric, and we’re so fascinated by the guy and his manicured hair, we overlook the fact he can’t sing (sorry Justin).

In our circles at Burt, we regularly hear, “I only buy premium placements for my campaigns,” or “This is a premium ad network,” or “We only work with premium sites,” or, my personal favorite, “We have both premium and non-premium placements.” The term ‘premium’ is so overused in so many contexts we no longer know what it means.”

Read the entire article at ExhangeWire.

On yet another occasion there has been proven that Swedish soil has something special for breeding successful start-ups! The 2012 Bully Awards* announced last week place no less than 9 startups on the list of 30 winners. And it sure feels great to be one of them. They’ve given us a Yearling badge, in their own terms defining that we are a classic start-ups. A classic - we like the sound of that: just as a classic car like Ford GT40 or you know a classic pair of Converse sneakers or a classic action hero such as Superman himself=) Ok we might’ve pushed it a tiny bit too far comparing us with SUperman but you gotta love it being labeled a classic! Honoured and happy for the award we strive further of really becoming a classic of our costumers world. We’re celebrating with a classic playing out loud at the office:)

*We would like to take the opportunity to explicitly state that this is not an award given to us for bullying someone. Just to be on the safe side we do not tolerate any acts of that kind at the office or at any Burt held occasion. We don’t like, tolerate, encourage or employ bullies. There you go - just wanted to make that clear=)

We have done our Master’s Thesis project about Browser Fingerprinting as an alternative to cookie-based identification methods. Now, I know what you’re thinking; tracking Internet users without them knowing is evil. Well it might be, at least if you’re not transparent about what you collect and why you want to track your users. Another crucial feature which needs be provided not to be evil, is some way for the users to opt-out (e.g. DNT). Anyhow, the ethical issues have not been our main concern for the thesis as we have been looking at the technical challenges.

Here’s the slides and a link to the video from Theo’s presentation at DeNormalised London.

The awesome people at SkillsMatter also recorded the talk and have put the video online.

“G*d damn it, you’re a programmer. Start using an editor you can damn well program.”- Magnar Sveen

If you’re a true programmer you gotta love that quote - I sure do!

To start off with, we have to get it clear what Emacs is. According to the official website:

“Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor - and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp.”

But what does that mean? Emacs is extensible. Well… most editors are, you can just download a plugin and install it. Emacs is customizable. Again, most editors are. You can just grab your mouse, browse through the menu system and hopefully you’ll find an option for it.

As appeared in Mergermarket Proprietary Intelligence section on September 24th, 2012

Burt, a Swedish analytics platform for media companies, is in talks with strategic and financial investors to raise more than USD 7m before the year-end, founder and CEO Gustav Von Sydow said.

The company raised around USD 3m last year from angel investors and Swedish venture capital fund Industrifonden. The new funding round will bring total funding above the USD 10m mark and Industrifonden will follow up on its early investment, the CEO said. The founders are still discussing whether they will sell a majority stake, but are open to that option, Von Sydow said.

After big success with the ATS Stockholm Networking Party earlier this year there was no doubt we’d support one in London as well. I guess we’re not much of “a roll-ups company” and we do like to hang out and talk, be it about the viewable impressions, RTB, value of the internet media or just about favourite beer brands. Actually at its best all of that at the same time:)

The agenda for today’s event looks great, the BFI Southbank is just a lovely place to meet up all these amazing people and we thought we’d threw in a bit of a surprise for the networking party on top of that.

There is quite a few of us here on spot in London but all the big magic and the REALLY smart people our back home in Gothenburg and what would be a better way to show what we’re really made of and how things are done than inviting someone over to Sweden, right?

Well here’s what we did: one of the beers served at the Networking Party later today will be marked gold - yes just one and only and that will be a ticket to the Burt Factory (yeah you know, a bit like Charlie and his Chocolate Factory golden ticket). 

So join us for a beer or two tonight and maybe you’re the lucky person that gets to come over to visit our HQ in Gothenburg. 

Btw we do know how to build apps, crunch a whole lot of data but we also know how to have fun… for a glimpse of that visit our Tumblr.