Patent Application
20070061196
§ 1.1 Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns advertising on offline properties, such a print publications for example, having spots for advertisements (referred to as “as spots”). In particular, the present invention concerns improving the means by which ads are placed on offline properties.
§ 1.2 Background Information
Traditionally, to have advertisements placed on a print publication, advertisers must (1) find a suitable publication, (2) determine available ad spots and formats for the publication, (3) make sure their ad complies with publisher guidelines, (4) agree to “terms and conditions” set forth by the publisher, (5) reserve an ad spot by a specified “reservation” date, and (6) send (or provide) a copy, sometimes a physical copy, to the publisher by a specified “material” date. The publisher might require advance payment, or might bill the advertiser later.
Some larger advertisers and larger publishers have employees or agents responsible for negotiating advertising rates, commitments, terms and employees or agents.
Unfortunately, this process is laborious for advertisers. Further, if an advertiser wants to advertise with more than one print publication, they typically need to perform this process for each publication. This may become so difficult for some advertisers, such as small advertisers, that they don't advertise at all, or limit their advertising to avoid the overhead associated with managing advertising in multiple print publications. For example, some advertisers may find it daunting to track different rates, different formats, and different terms and/or conditions, for different publishers. Some advertisers may find it challenging to send a given ad to different publishers at different locations. Some advertisers may find it challenging to find publications suitable to place their ads in.
The traditional process of placing ads in print publications also has some disadvantages for publishers. Specifically, since many advertisers may limit the publications on which they advertise, there may be less competition for ad spots on a publication. Less potential advertisers means that publishers might get less advertising revenue than they could potentially get, and might get ads that are less relevant or less useful to their readers than they could potentially get.
Thus, it would be useful to improve processes associated with advertising on print publications. It would similarly be useful to improve processes associated with adverting on other offline properties, such as billboards, posters, placard, signs, banners, sandwich boards, displays, such as those found in stations, airports, stores, other printed displays, public buses, taxis, etc.
Embodiments consistent with the present invention may improve processes for advertising on offline properties, such as print publications, by (a) accepting ad creative information and associating it with an ad identifier, (b) accepting offline property information and associating it with a property identifier, (c) determining at least one ad, each having an associated ad identifier, to be placed in or on an ad spot of an offline property, (d) generating a final ad using the ad creative information associated with the at least one ad identifier associated with the determined at least one ad, and (e) providing the final ad to an entity for placement on or in the offline property.
The present invention may involve novel methods, apparatus, message formats, and/or data structures for entering advertisement creatives and buying ad space in offline properties, such as print publications for example, online. The following description is presented to enable one skilled in the art to make and use the invention, and is provided in the context of particular applications and their requirements. Thus, the following description of embodiments consistent with the present invention provides illustration and description, but is not intended to be exhaustive or to limit the present invention to the precise form disclosed. Various modifications to the disclosed embodiments will be apparent to those skilled in the art, and the general principles set forth below may be applied to other embodiments and applications. For example, although a series of acts may be described with reference to a flow diagram, the order of acts may differ in other implementations when the performance of one act is not dependent on the completion of another act. Further, non-dependent acts may be performed in parallel. No element, act or instruction used in the description should be construed as critical or essential to the present invention unless explicitly described as such. Also, as used herein, the article “a” is intended to include one or more items. Where only one item is intended, the term “one” or similar language is used. In the following, “information” may refer to the actual information, or a pointer to, identifier of, or location of such information. Thus, the present invention is not intended to be limited to the embodiments shown and the inventors regard their invention to include any patentable subject matter described.
In the following definitions of terms that may be used in the specification are provided in § 4.1. Then, exemplary embodiments of the present invention are described in § 4.2. Thereafter, specific examples illustrating the utility of one exemplary embodiment of the present invention are provided in § 4.3. Finally, some conclusions regarding the present invention are set forth in § 4.4.
Ads, such as those used in the exemplary embodiments described below, or any other system, may have various intrinsic features. Such features may be specified by an application and/or an advertiser. These features are referred to as “ad features” below. For example, in the case of a text ad, ad features may include a title line, ad text, etc. In the case of an image ad, ad features may include images. Depending on the type of ad, ad features may include one or more of the following: text, images, logos, a special telephone number or code to track ad “call-throughs”, a special Internet address (URL) to track user responses, etc.
When an ad is placed, one or more parameters may be used to describe how, when, and/or where the ad was placed. These parameters are referred to as “placement parameters” or “serving parameters” below. Placement parameters may include, for example, one or more of the following: features of (including information on) the property (e.g., printed publication name, issue, volume number, circulation date, etc.) on or in which, or with which, the ad was placed, an absolute position of the ad on the page on which it was placed, a position of the ad relative to other ads placed, an absolute size of the ad, a size of the ad relative to other ads, a color of the ad, a number of other ads placed, types of other ads placed, time of year placed, etc. Naturally, there are other placement parameters that may be used in the context of the invention.
Although placement parameters may be extrinsic to ad features, they may be associated with an ad as placement conditions or constraints in an automated system. When used as placement conditions or constraints, such placement parameters are referred to simply as “placement constraints” (or “targeting criteria”). For example, in some systems, an advertiser may be able to target the placement of its ad by specifying that it is only to be placed on back covers, only as a full page ad, only within an article, only in the months of November and December, etc. As another example, in some systems, an advertiser may specify that its ad is to be placed only if a page or property will include certain keywords or phrases, or includes certain topics or concepts, or falls under a particular cluster or clusters, or some other classification or classifications (e.g., verticals). As yet another example, an advertiser may specify that its ad is to be placed only on properties to be seen by a certain type of user, such as a certain demographic. Finally, in some systems an ad might be targeted so that it is placed in a property to be located in, or delivered to, a particular location.
“Ad information” may include any combination of ad features, ad placement constraints, information derivable from ad features or ad serving constraints (referred to as “ad derived information”), and/or information related to the ad (referred to as “ad related information”), as well as an extension of such information (e.g., information derived from ad related information).
A “offline property” is something on which ads can be presented. An offline property may include offline content (e.g., a newspaper, a magazine, a theatrical production, a concert, a sports event, etc.), and/or offline objects (e.g., a billboard, a stadium score board, and outfield wall, the side of truck trailer, etc.). Offline properties with content (e.g., magazines, newspapers, etc.) may be referred to as “media properties” and those printed may be referred to as “printed publications.” Although properties may themselves be offline, pertinent information about a property (e.g., attribute(s), topic(s), concept(s), category(ies), keyword(s), relevancy information, type(s) of ads supported, circulation, rates, audience demographics, location, time of publication, etc.) may be available online. For example, an outdoor jazz music festival may have entered the topics “music” and “jazz”, the location of the concerts, the time of the concerts, artists scheduled to appear at the festival, and types of available ad spots (e.g., spots in a printed program, spots on a stage, spots on seat backs, audio announcements of sponsors, etc.).
“Offline property information” may include any information included in the property, information derivable from information included in the property (referred to as “property derived information”), and/or information related to the property (referred to as “property related information”), as well as an extensions of such information (e.g., information derived from related information). An example of property derived information is a classification based on textual content of a magazine. Examples of property related information include property information from previous issues of a given printed publication.
An “offline property owner” is a person or entity that has some property right in the content of a media property. An offline property owner may be an author of the content. In addition, or alternatively, an offline property owner may have rights to reproduce the content, rights to prepare derivative works of the content, rights to display or perform the content publicly, and/or other proscribed rights in the content. A “publisher” is an example of an offline property owner.
“User information” may include user behavior information and/or user profile information.
Print publication ad spot filling operations 150 may be used to fill available ad spots on offline properties to be published or otherwise released. Such operations 150 may work in one or more of the following ways. First, an advertiser can specify one or more printed publications in which they want their ad(s) to appear. In this scenario, it is possible to take ad spots “off the market” once they are filled by ads. It is also possible accept offers corresponding to ads, and select winning ads at a given time before publication. Second, a publisher can specify one or more ads that it wants to place in its printed publication. In this scenario, it is possible to take ads “off the market” once a budget limit (e.g., specified by an advertiser) for the ad is reached. It is also possible accept offers corresponding to ad spots, and select at a given time before publication, winning ad spots for the ad. Third, available advertisements can be automatically assigned to available ad spots in printed publications. This automated process may involve one or more of (1) finding ads that are relevant to a printed publication or ad spot thereof, (2) if there are more relevant ads than ad spots, arbitrating among competing ads, (3) finding ad spots that are relevant to an ad, and (4) if there are more relevant ad spots than can be paid for due to a budget of the ad, arbitrating among competing ad spots. Arbitration techniques and/or techniques for determining relevant ads from an online advertising environment may be used or adapted to this market for offline property ad spots. Examples of such arbitration techniques are described in U.S. Patent Application: Ser. No. 10/112,656, titled “METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR ORDERING ADVERTISEMENTS BASED ON PERFORMANCE INFORMATION”, filed on Mar. 29, 2002, and listing Georges R. Harik, Lawrence E. Page, Jane Manning and Salar Arta Kamangar as inventors; Ser. No. 10/112,654, titled “METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR ORDERING ADVERTISEMENTS BASED ON PERFORMANCE INFORMATION AND PRICE INFORMATION”, filed on Mar. 29, 2002, and listing Salar Arta Kamangar, Ross Koningstein and Eric Veach as inventors; Ser. No. 10/314,427, titled “METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR SERVING RELEVANT ADVERTISEMENTS”, filed on Dec. 6, 2002, and listing Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik and Paul Buchheit as inventors; Ser. No. 10/375,900, titled “SERVING ADVERTISEMENTS BASED ON CONTENT”, filed on Feb. 26, 2003, and listing Darrell Anderson, Paul Buchheit, Alexander Paul Carobus, Yingwei Cui, Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik, Deepak Jindal and Narayanan Shivakumar as inventors and Ser. No. 10/634,501, titled “SERVING CONTENT-RELEVANT ADVERTISEMENTS WITH CLIENT-SIDE DEVICE SUPPORT”, filed on Aug. 5, 2003, and listing Darrell Anderson, Paul Buchheit, Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik, Carl Laurence Gonsalves, Noam Shazeer and Narayanan Shivakumar as inventors.
The publication information 125 may be updated to identify ads that have been determined to be placed in ad spots of upcoming print publications, and/or the ad information 145 may be updated to identify ad spots in which given ads are to be placed. In any event, print publication notification operations 155 may provide ads 160 to the print publishers so that such ads 160 may be placed in print publications 165. The ads 160 may include one or more formatted ads, a publication identifier, an ad spot identifier, etc.
Accounting and billing operations 170 may be used to assess charges to advertiser 105, and/or to track and/or make payments to print publishers 115.
4.2.1 Exemplary Methods
Referring back to block 240, in at least some embodiments consistent with the present invention, advertisers will be allowed to search through a list of publications. Search parameters may include demographics, circulation, price, and keywords (e.g., to search over title, editorial profile, and editorial calendar (basically list of topics for each issue), content in an upcoming publication, etc.) etc.
Referring back to block 280, advertisers may select printed publications, such as magazines, they wish to purchase space in. Alternatively, or in addition, advertisers may specify particular ad spots within printed publications they wish to purchase.
Now referring to
Referring back to block 610, a request for an ad spot may be generated in response to an advertiser selection, results of an automated arbitration (i.e., winning ad or ads for an ad spot), etc.
Referring back to blocks 620 and 630, in an alternative embodiment, the search operations can filter out publications that have no space available instead. In such an alternative embodiment, an advertiser will not be shown ad spots or printed publications that are already full. Alternatively, search results may inform the advertiser that a “matching” printed publication has become full.
Referring back to block 660, the print ad(s) may be provide to the publisher any time before a “material date” specified by the publisher.
4.2.2 Exemplary User Interface Screens
4.2.3 Exemplary Apparatus
The one or more processors 1010 may execute machine-executable instructions (e.g., C or C++ running on the Solaris operating system available from Sun Microsystems Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif. or the Linux operating system widely available from a number of vendors such as Red Hat, Inc. of Durham, N.C.) to perform one or more aspects of the present invention. At least a portion of the machine executable instructions may be stored (temporarily or more permanently) on the one or more storage devices 1020 and/or may be received from an external source via one or more input interface units 1030.
In one embodiment, the machine 1000 may be one or more conventional personal computers. In this case, the processing units 1010 may be one or more microprocessors. The bus 1040 may include a system bus. The storage devices 1020 may include system memory, such as read only memory (ROM) and/or random access memory (RAM). The storage devices 1020 may also include a hard disk drive for reading from and writing to a hard disk, a magnetic disk drive for reading from or writing to a (e.g., removable) magnetic disk, and an optical disk drive for reading from or writing to a removable (magneto-) optical disk such as a compact disk or other (magneto-) optical media.
A user may enter commands and information into the personal computer through input devices 1032, such as a keyboard and pointing device (e.g., a mouse) for example. Other input devices such as a microphone, a joystick, a game pad, a satellite dish, a scanner, or the like, may also (or alternatively) be included. These and other input devices are often connected to the processing unit(s) 1010 through an appropriate interface 1030 coupled to the system bus 1040. The output devices 1034 may include a monitor or other type of display device, which may also be connected to the system bus 1040 via an appropriate interface. In addition to (or instead of) the monitor, the personal computer may include other (peripheral) output devices (not shown), such as speakers and printers for example.
The operations described above may be performed on one or more computers. Such computers may communicate with each other via one or more networks, such as the Internet for example.
§ 4.2.4 Refinements and Alternatives
Although many of the exemplary embodiments consistent with the present invention concerned printed publications, other embodiments consistent with the present invention may be used with any offline property.
Referring back to publication information 125, such information is often included in a so-called media kit, and is referred to as “media kit information” without loss of generality. Media kit information may be manually extracted from a mailed, emailed, or uploaded media kit from the publisher. Missing information, if any, may be gathered via telephone, email, etc. Alternatively, or in addition, media kit information may be entered (e.g., in formatted fields of a template) by the publisher via a U/I.
Media kit information may include, for example, one or more of the following:
Data related to the affects of a print ad campaign or offline ad campaign on one or more of:
An entity controlling a system such as that 100 of
An ad may be created first, and then a print publication(s) selected. Alternatively, or in addition, a print publication(s) may be selected first, and then an ad may be created. Alternatively, or in addition, candidate a print publication(s) may be selected and saved, the ad created, and one or more candidates selected for a given ad.
Although some of the foregoing embodiments described the filling of ad spots on a first-come, first-served basis, other techniques may be used to fill ad spots. For example, an auction at a predetermined time may arbitrate among too many ads (or too many relevant ads) competing for too few ad spots. Such embodiments may advantageously consider better offers from later committing advertisers that might have otherwise been precluded from placing their ad(s) on a (filled) ad spot.
The following example illustrates the utility of an embodiment consistent with the present invention. It is assumed that publishers have entered publication information, such as media kit information (or someone has entered such information for them).
An advertiser can create an ad by uploading/choosing images, and entering text, telephone numbers, etc., into a wizard. (Recall, e.g., screen 900 of
Suppose that the advertiser places an order to have its previously created ad placed in the October 2005 issue of magazine A at a cost of $1000.00. Suppose further that the ad is to be one of six (6) ads of the same format to be placed on a single page (e.g., on the inside back cover of the next issue of magazine A). Suppose further that the ad network committed to buy, or will commit to buy, or has the option to buy the inside back cover of the next issue of magazine A.
Suppose, ultimately, the six advertisers agree to place ads on the inside back cover of the next issue of magazine A before the a specified close date. The ad network may compose a single page ad including the six ads. The ad network may format the ads to a publisher (or agreed upon) specification and aggregate the six (6) smaller ads into a full page ad. The ad network may then forward a copy of the ad (e.g., in electronic, film, or print form) to magazine A.
The ad network may assess and bill a charge of $1000.00 to each of the six (6) advertisers. The payment of the billed charges may be conditioned upon the satisfaction of one or more conditions (e.g., magazine A being published with the ad). Assume further that the ad network had negotiated a price with magazine A to place ads on the inside back cover of the next issue for $5500.00, perhaps conditioned upon the satisfaction of one or more conditions (e.g., proof of publication, such as a tear sheet). Assume that the ad network pays magazine A $5500.00 and receives six (6) payments of $1000.00 each from advertisers, thus realizing a profit of $500.00.
Embodiments consistent with the present invention may offer one or more of the following advantages. An advertising network can gather data concerning the affects of offline advertising on other things of interest to advertisers, such as online ad campaigns, advertiser buzz (e.g., in terms of search queries, stories concerning the advertiser, etc.). An advertising network can derive profits based on the difference between its costs to get advertising spot(s) and how much it charges one or more advertisers for such ad spot(s). More and smaller advertisers can participate in the market for offline ad spots since barriers of entry are lowered. (For example, advertisers don't need to send, typically by mail or express, ad copies to multiple magazines, advertisers don't have to concern themselves with different “Terms and Conditions” (besides price) for various magazines, etc.) This increases competition and allows offline property owners to better monetize their offline properties and/or offer their readers better (e.g., more relevant ads). It also allows both advertisers and offline property owners to reduce overhead associated with placing ads on offline properties.
Benefit is claimed, under 35 U.S.C. § 119(e)(1), to the filing date of both: (1) U.S. provisional patent application Ser. No. 60/716,255, titled “ENTERING ADVERTISMENT CREATIVES AND BUYING AD SPACE IN OFFLINE PROPERTIES, SUCH AS PRINT PUBLICATIONS FOR EXAMPLE, ONLINE”, filed on Sep. 12, 2005; and (2) U.S. provisional application Ser. No. 60/718,767, titled “PLATFORM FOR BUYING, SELLING, AND PLACING TRADITIONAL ADVERTISING SUCH AS TV, RADIO, NEWSPAPER, AND MAGAZINE, INSTEAD OF, OR IN ADDITION TO, ONLINE ADVERTISING”, filed on Sep. 20, 2005, and listing Steve Miller, Gokul Rajaram, and Nathalie Criou as inventors, for any inventions disclosed in the manner provided by 35 U.S.C. § 112, ¶1. Those provisional applications are expressly incorporated herein by reference. The scope of the present invention is not limited to any requirements of the specific embodiments described in those provisional applications.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60716255 | Sep 2005 | US | |
| 60718767 | Sep 2005 | US |
