Burt blog

A part of gathering all the data and crunching it is also to be able to make assumptions on future trends. So here’s and idea how we could visualize those predictions. Given the past four weeks, how should next week’s pageviews look like - hour by hour.

You’d be able to quickly answer questions such as: What’s the number of pageviews, exposures you’ll be able to serve, as well as predict worst and best case scenarios…

We’re flirting with the idea of creating tour guides for our apps. Here’s an example how it could look like for our Campaign Reporting app. Take it right away or pick it up at some other point when you have time.

You forget things, right? Everyone does. The viewable-active-visible-durational-collegial-clustered-megaflips. ..per second? Huh.. How’s that important, again?

We do try to avoid confusing and un-actionable metrics, but we also release new apps all the time. This’d be a good way of getting quickly (re-)acquainted. 

View all your placements at a glance, drag them around, pinch and spread to get deeper insights using your mobile, tablet or computer.

This view emphasises only the most significant about your placements. Viewing it as rows in a table can draw your focus away from what’s important - just because you can see and sort placements by number of clicks doesn’t necessarily make it the only way you should look at it. Colour coded in positive green for your best performing placements and alarming red for those that might need more of your attention. Quickly choose placement  of your interest and get more data by pinch and spread. Easy peasy.

When it comes to advertising, we at Burt abide a simple but time proven and effective philosophy:  if consumers like what they see in an ad, it will work. If they don’t, it most likely won’t. 

Most adtech companies base their business on the notion that powerful algorithms can deliver — say it with me now – the right ad, to the right person, in the right place, at the right time - and that’s all they need to do.  We, on the other hand, believe ad placement is only part of the challenge and if digital advertising is to be successful, there needs to be as much focus on the non-technical function of design as on the technical issue of inventory.  That idea was the original inspiration behind Burt Designer Suite.

Media owners we work with often own several sites. While they usually want to optimize every site as separate entity there is also a need to have an overview over entire business they own.

In other words our starting point solving this problem was to provide media owners with an overview of different sites and easy comparisons between them without digging too deep into details.

We know all there is to know about your demographics. It’s been a part of our major apps for a long time. You want to know who saw your advertisers’ campaign? We got you covered. What’s the age distribution for people visiting this webpage or a certain category? Not a problem. You have all the information already there, but it isn’t very accessible and it requires a lot of manual labor to dig out, polish and present. The things get further complicated if you have multiple sites. 

How do you know which combination of sites is seen by your advertisers’preferred audience? And how many were they? You’d have to have some sort of tool that analyses demographics across your sites and then lets you combine sites and calculate reach and affinity(*) for your advertisers’ audience and tells you how many impressions you’d need to book. Preferably in real-time, while you have your customer on the phone, right? 

We just introduced a brand new app to our Burt.hub family and we thought we’d share some thoughts and deliver some background to this sweet new analytics ride. 

We always strive to make our apps simple, fun and beautiful. And relevant. Relevant - that’s a huge part of it. And it’s a lot harder that it seems. We collect these vast oceans of data and then we filter and process and crunch and analyze until what we’ve got is as potent as Uranium-235 and means something to our customers. Then we wrap it all up nicely and make it fast and intuitive to discover and consume. Great success!

In doing so, however, we end up with a lot of good data getting overlooked. We had built a system we used internally for a couple of months to see trends and figure our differences across various dimensions over time when one of our more active customers came to visit and got blown away. He’d loved our other apps and our approach thus far, but this was something else. He could see all sorts of uses for our little tool and demanded we’d give to him.

We didn’t.

Thing is, you can say a lot about Burt but damnit we don’t do anything half-arsed. We do it right, or we don’t do it at all.

So we sent him home and told him to keep a keen eye towards the skies in the west. We proceeded ripping the tool apart, making it faster, more flexible, hotter and added vitals such as excel export, hourly-, daily-, weekly-, monthly- rollups, freely selected time-spans, device type separation and just maxing it all out.

Check out the video below. Not bad a start, ey? We’ve got great plans for the app and will add additional data-sources and other improvements continuously. And as we always say for all of our apps - they really come to life when you put some real chunky data in there =)

Want to see more and play around with you own data? Get in touch with my super friendly colleague Daniel Alman at alman@burtcorp.com and he’ll hook you up.

As of yesterday all the apps in the Burt.hub got some minor touch-ups and fixes. From a purely technical standpoint, nothing has even remotely changed and all our apps will continue to deliver the ease of use and stellar results you’ve come to expect from us here at Burt.

As you cruise through our apps the one thing you might notice is that we stopped using the term In-Screen and opted instead to go with the more common terminology, Viewable Impressions. We are basically only changing one word: Viewable instead of In-screen. It sounds quite insignificant maybe but is far from that. It is very important for us and our clients to speak in the same terms avoiding every possible confusion.

The problem that we encountered when discussing In-screen with our customers was, that it was often confused with First Screen. Especially on the US market the latter is an established term quite different to what we define as In-Screen and therefore people find it confusing to understand what our In-screen in relation to that is.

We conducted a costumer survey the other day and with high awareness that most of our clients have pretty busy schedules we kind of didn’t expect miracles but to our big surprise and joy the results were pretty neat.

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.