Many advertisers place inserts filled with loss-leader products on a regular basis in the Oregonian newspaper, however those dollars are rarely brought online to the paper’s sister organization OregonLive.com. I identified an opportunity to help bring these dollars to online by greatly reducing the labor intensive process of translating the images and text of the inserts to the online ads. Within the XML ads, the same images and text are pulled in — leaderboard, rectangle, half-page, skyscraper — allowing all the ad units to use the same images, and text. Each ad can be customized with variables that control colors, typefaces, position, etc. Altering these variables is simplified for the designers with a visual customization form, thus requiring no knowledge of Actionscript to tailor the ads to the advertiser’s brand.
