Frequently Asked Questions
Video advertising
Why should publishers offer video advertising?
Video advertising is one of the most powerful ways to promote a business. It typically provides a higher response rate and has better brand impact for advertisers. For these reasons, video advertising generates higher revenue opportunities for publishers as advertisers pay more for this premium format.
How much tailoring is possible with your Video Ad Creator?
Some – but not too much. Simplicity and quality are at the root of our video advertising service. All our video ads are made by professional video makers and are specified to ‘tell a story in 15 seconds’. Publishers (or advertisers) typically add a start slate and an end slate with a call to action – thereby tailoring the ad, but retaining the desired impact. Companies who want a fully bespoke video advert can use our Bespoke Video Ad Creator service.
Who are your video adverts aimed at?
We have over 10,000 video ads in our library. They are typically suitable for SME advertisers. Many of our video advertisements are created to work for very specific industry sectors, ranging from carpet stores to kitchen manufacturers, and plumbers to painters and decorators. Some video ads are more generic and cater for promotions such as ’20% discount’ or ‘Buy one get one free’ type promotions.
Where can the video adverts be played out?
The video ads can be played out across a publishers site, or across the Localstars Local Ad Network. The ads can also be played out on an advertiser’s own website.
Can each industry-specific video be purchased by two companies at the same time?
Our platform is configurable to manage such conflicts. A publisher may, for example, decide to make each ad exclusive to one advertiser per website for a fixed period of time.
Rich Media Fast Ads feature
Why do publishers use your Rich Media Fast Ads service?
There are lots of reason. The main reasons is that it enables the creation of a high volume of adverts at a low cost – while retaining a high quality of output. Quite often, a publishers in-house creative studio may take 30-45 minutes to create a digital display ad. The Localstars platform can reduce this to less than two minutes.
What can your Rich Media Fast Ads platform do?
It is a highly flexible and powerful platform. For example, based on one set of inputs (ie words, pictures, logos) it can automatically create all four IAB standard digital ad formats in an instant – a leaderboard, MPU, banner and skyscraper. This gives publishers a lot of flexibility in terms of filling their website inventory.
How much can your Rich Media ads be personalised?
The ads are fully personalisable to an advertiser – words, fonts, images, logos, etc are all configurable.
Why is the Localstars platform so fast at creating Rich Media Ads?
The Rich Media Fast Ads platform has a number of modes. One mode is where a Publisher simply selects an industry and is presented with dozens of industry-relevant, ready to air ads. In this mode, a change of a few lines of text means the ad is good to go. In large scale deployment, this mode can be fully automated, taking relevant company information from CRM or booking systems and pre-populating relevant ads. In another mode, the Publisher can take full control to create highly bespoke ads – changing all elements to the ad. This can be done by operators with no technical knowledge. Again, in large scale mode, a more automated solution to this enables customer images from pre-existing databases to be pulled into the platform to auto-create the ad.
How do the ads work with ad servers?
Our platform integrates with most common digital ad servers, enabling fast and efficient deployment. With more large scale deployments, our technical engagement teams work with the publisher to have a deep integration into the relevant ad server to further optimise ad delivery and campaign performance.
What format are your Rich Media Fast Ads created in?
All our Rich Media ads output in Flash format.
Technology and operations
Do you integrate with a publishers booking systems?
We work hard with our partners in the early stages of the relationship to ensure the Localstars platform is fully integrated into the local systems to the degree required by the publisher. A fully integrated deployment sees our technologies fully integrated into pre-existing sales booking, production tracking and ad serving environments. As our service can also operate on a standalone basis, other publishers prefer a simpler ‘of-the-shelf’ deployment.
What is the key ‘value add’ of the Localstars platform?
The Localstars platform has a number of unique advert creation features, but the simple end to end capabilities – advertising sales tools, ad creation, customer proofing through to ad serving and reporting – mean that Localstars is an end to end service for driving and managing digital advertising sales performance.
