Author Archive

As an integral part of the creation of our service, the AdDogs team has defined thousands of products (on-line, newspapers, magazines, trade journals) and tens of thousands of rates and ad placement specifications.

As good as our staff has been at representing publisher presence in our system, we realize that they could never do so as well as could the owners of the media themselves.

Our service is designed so that publishers can do just that.

Whether you’re simply interested in ensuring you put your best foot to all visitors who search AdDogs for advertising opportunities or if you’re a Self-Service Publisher Advertising client and want to take a more targeted approach in your custom portal, you can:

1. Enhance the description of your offerings (keywords, categories, etc.)
2. Replace the preview graphics for your publications
3. Update your geographic coverage or reader demographics
4. Ad rates and placements, either as specials or permanent rate card changes

If you’re a publisher interested in any of these options, please feel free to create a media provider account for yourself, and then contact us, and we can quickly transfer control of your own products to you.

Among the services we offer, AdDogs has a “software as a service” model for providing publishers with a comprehensive method to allow their advertisers to design and purchase ads, print or on-line, in any section of any of their publications.

Implementation is quick and simple – here’s how it works:

• In many cases, the publisher’s rate cards and media definitions are already in our system.
• Adding or changing rates is easy, and can be performed by publisher personnel in minutes.
• We provide access to a uniquely named site containing only the products belonging to that publisher.
• This customized site can be linked to from the publisher’s main website, in any fashion the publisher chooses.
• Advertisers following that link can then design and purchase ads in any sections of a publication for which the publisher has chosen to specify rates and specifications.
• Changes to your product description or rates are made available both to visitors at your Publisher Portal and to the general users of the main AdDogs site.

Our introductory terms for this new offering can be seen in the sample publisher agreement (PDF).

During ad creation, you’ll see a periodically updated picture of how your text and pictures are laid out.

In addition, when you “Continue to preview page” during ad creation, you can view a PDF that depicts your ad in the standard rendering of the template you’ve used to create it.

Remember, however, that one of the key capabilities of AdDogs is to render the same ad in multiple sizes and shapes, without further effort on your part. We can even do this simultaneously, using the same ad, for multiple placements in multiple publications with completely different specifications.

The ad that you see during preview or PDF format within the ad building process may not look precisely the same when rendered in a rectangular space as it does when rendered in a square space. It may also look different in as a “tall rectangle” than it would as a “wide rectangle”.

You can’t truly tell how the ad will look when it’s placed until you’ve chosen the media into which you’re going to place it. So don’t over-stress on perfection during the ad building process — you’ll have plenty of opportunity to view it in its ultimate form once you’ve chosen the outlet where you’ll be running it.

In fact, when you choose the space where you want to run it, one of the mandatory parts of the process is that you review it, in its actual “to-be-placed” size, and approve the presentation. If, at that point, you don’t like the look, you can easily go back and make adjustments.

On occasion, you might find that the way an ad renders isn’t what you expected.

This would typically occur in a case where you’re placing the same ad in multiple publications with different mechanical specifications, in particular, such a case where one ad is a vertical placement and the other is a horizontal.

Of course, AdDogs.com is designed to deal with these different shapes automatically, but you might find that, for instance, a heading you’ve defined in your vertically-oriented ad fits just fine, left to right, but when the ad is rendered horizontally (wider than it is tall), the heading is left justfied, because you didn’t specify centering in the original, it just “happened”.

In cases like this, you’ve got several choices.

1. Ignore the problem and move on. We don’t recommend this, because the effort it takes to get the ad rendered correctly in most cases is so trivial that you might as well just do it (see below)
2. Return to the order placement screen (from which you choose dates and approve the overall ad) and click the red X to remove the specific ad rendering from your order. In this case, you’d likely later go back and alter the ad definition, then re-place the order with only that rendering in that publication.We also don’t recommend this, for the same reason as before - the effort it takes to get the ad rendered correctly in most cases is so trivial that you might as well just do it, as detailed in the next point.
3. Take these simple steps:Return to the “View Orders” page and delete the orderReturn to the “Build Ad” page and adjust the original ad as needed to render correctly in all cases. In the example described here, you’d specify centering on the heading line, then save the ad again

   Create a new order, specifying the same ad (now corrected) and the same media you’d previously selected

In that third choice above, we think you’ll find that within 30 seconds, you’ll be right back on track, with a single ad properly rendered in all the publications you’re trying to reach.

If you find otherwise, or have questions on the matter, please Contact Us.

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There’s a special case here, however, worthy of discussion: Ads you didn’t create using AdDogs, but instead uploaded as PDF, EPS, or another accepted format. These are perfectly acceptable to use in our system, of course, otherwise we wouldn’t accept them. But they’re quite different than an ad created from one of our templates. Here’s why:

Taking the most common case as our standard example (ad pre-created elsewhere and saved as PDF), there’s a limit to the amount of reformatting we can do on such documents, because they don’t come to us as a segmented, templated page with a heading, a body, some pictures, and a tagline. Instead, they arrive, in essence, as a fully formed picture, which cannot be decomposed and shuffled around to fit any sort of space in which you might want to place it.

We do have the ability to alter the presentation, but only in terms of resizing it, not properly reshaping it. An ad created from our templates and rendered on our system can be reshaped to an amazing degree — a tall rectangular ad can be recast as perfectly square, and in fact can be recast as a wide rectangular ad in most cases, all without loss or distortion of the content. If you place an uploaded PDF ad in a space that doesn’t precisely match the dimensions of the PDF, however, we’re forced to proportionally resize the ad to match the space, and if proportionality cannot be maintained, you’ll notice clipping around the edges of the ad, as we try our hardest to get it to fit where you’re trying to advertise.

As with all matters related to our services, if you have questions on the matter, we invite you to Contact Us.

In all likelihood, you’ve arrived at this page because you attempted to enter a contract price during media selection in the ad placement process.

There are a few details still being worked out in our contract price handling, and we hope the short delay won’t inconvenience you. But if it does, please contact us for assistance.

We expect to have full advertiser contract price maintenance in place by Tuesday, March 10, 2009.

Thank you for your patience.

Update: March 10, 2009: Contract pricing entry function has been reactivated.

At first, it can seem a bit confusing.

It needed to be said, and we’ve said it. There are several pieces to the puzzle that makes up the placement of an ad. Potentially more confusing, they don’t really have to be performed in the same order every time.

But let’s pretend, for an initial introduction, that you’re going to follow them from A to Z, your first time around.

The steps in placing an ad:

1. Log in to AdDogs
2. Build an ad, modify one of your prior ad designs, or upload a finished ad
3. Search our media database to find publications, placement types, and pricing
4. Choose one or more publications and placement types (add to your “media list” for later use)
5. Create an order, by matching up your ad with one or more of the publications in your media list
6. Add the order to your shopping cart, specifying publication dates and approving final ads
7. Check out, pay for the ad, and receive confirmation of your order

Read on, however – our aim is to make this potentially complicated process clear for you.

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Complex project? We can help.

AdDogs is staffed with advertising industry professionals who can provide you with a full range of custom services. Our expertise includes:

• Custom Advertisements and Advertising Campaigns
• Branding
• Brochure Design and Printing
• Custom Creative and Copywriting
• Direct Mail Design, Printing and Distribution
• Logo Design
• Media Planning, Buying and Contract Negotiation

If you are looking for a fast and easy way to get your projects under way please call or email us!

(832) 485-7134 -or- email Dana Kingshill

You can view short video tutorials on these topics:

• Registration as an advertiser
• Logging in and building an ad
• Selecting media for ad placement

Coming soon, additional videos, specific to the other key components of the system.

Until then, if you’ve arrived at this page and need assistance, please feel free to give us a call at:
(832) 485-7134 -or- email our support desk

AdDogs.com presently accepts payment via Amazon Payments or PayPal. Between these two options, you have the flexibility to pay via any major credit card or a direct debit from a bank account.

For those not familiar with these methods, they’re both highly reputable companies, each in its own way quite skilled in the process of handling electronic commerce. They’re not identical in form or function however.

If customers choose to use Amazon Payments, they must first have an account set up with Amazon. Many people have such accounts, as Amazon has distinguished itself over the past decade as the leading electronic merchant. They’re really quite good at handling payments, and they offer buyer protection programs which can be reviewed at their site.

PayPal is likewise a widely used service, but differs in that it’s a direct payment method: rather than charging a purchase to your PayPal account, as is the case with Amazon, you simply make a payment in which PayPal transfers money from either your PayPal account balance, your bank account, or the credit card of your choosing. All those choices are made available to you when you log in to your PayPal account. An additional and important difference is that you can make a PayPal payment without logging into your PayPal account, or without having a PayPal account at all.

Given the alternatives of Amazon and PayPal for payment processing, we at AdDogs have made the conscious decision to avoid ever being in possession of any customer’s credit card or bank account information. We don’t even want this information, let alone to store it in our system. Even though we employ standard data system protection and monitoring, we want to ensure that in the event of a breach, no sensitive information about any of our customers can be stolen from our site.

As of the data of this writing, Monster.com is in the recent news, the victim of their own massive data breach.

We don’t want to be in that position, and we don’t want to put our customers in that position.

And that’s why we choose to rely on well-known and respected companies like Amazon and PayPal to provide those services for our customers.

If you have any concerns about the payment process here at AdDogs.com, please feel free to contact us, and we’ll be happy to discuss them with you.