Ad Building

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.

During ad design & creation, there are three types of information you can provide to be incorporated into the ad template you’re using, resulting in a ready-to-run ad.

If you’ve arrived here via the context-sensitive help in our application, the following information will start out as a bit duplicative. Just in case you’ve reached this page directly or via a site search, here’s a bit of background information on what you can fill out to complete a template.

On the template entry page, you may see spaces for simple text entry, more complicated “mini-word-processor” boxes, which allow font, size, style, color, and alignment fine-tuning, spaces in which to upload images, or all three.

For the simple text boxes, characterized by their bland look, simply enter the text you want to appear on the ad. After you move to another field on the screen, your ad preview picture should update automatically after a short delay.

For the image upload spaces, click the box, and you’ll be prompted for the name of the local file on your computer to be uploaded into the ad.

For the most complex template field type, the rich text editor, there are some important things to keep in mind.

First, you’ll be working in a cut-down program similar to, but in no way identical to, a standard word processor such as Wordperfect or Microsoft Word. Within it, you’ll see buttons to control text formatting in a manner similar to every word processor you’ve ever used. The specifics of how to use a word processor are of course beyond the scope of this document. If you don’t know how to use one, it’s a wonder you’ve been able to even find this page, so we’ll assume this isn’t going to be a barrier to you.

Within the rich text box (or boxes – your template may define more than one of these boxes), the bottom portion allows entry of text. In most cases, standard word processing rules about how to apply formatting are in effect. There are, however, several crucial differences.

Pressing “Enter” at the end of a line will create a new paragraph, separated from the prior paragraph by a prominent blank line. If what you want is simply to proceed to the next line without starting a new paragraph, you’ll need to execute a “half line break”, which is performed by holding the shift key as you press “Enter”.

It’s quite common to find that the text for an ad is being copied out of another program which itself handles rich text natively. Examples of this include Microsoft Word, some versions of Microsoft Outlook, Adobe Acrobat, and potentially thousands of other possibilities. When copying text from programs like that, you’ll want to be very careful to ensure that you don’t become ensnared by the formatting gunk that those (and all such) programs embed, hidden in their text.

On this page, you may see spaces for simple text entry, more complicated “mini-word-processor” boxes, which allow font, size, style, color, and alignment fine-tuning, spaces in which to upload images, or all three.

For the simple text boxes, characterized by their bland look, simply enter the text you want to appear on the ad. After you move to another field on the screen, your ad preview picture should update automatically after a short delay.

For the image upload spaces, click the box, and you’ll be prompted for the name of the local file on your button labeled “Paste from Word”. It’s the picture of a clipboard with a small blue “W” on it, like so:  

When you click that icon, a window will open, into which you paste via whatever method you normally do such things. You’ll then click the “Insert” button, and the text will be sanitized as best it can be, before being pasted into our rich text control.

Important Note: “as best it can be”, referenced above, means what it says. We have no control over the quality of the formatting of text in other programs outside of AdDogs, and in some cases, Microsoft Word or other similar applications will create utterly convoluted formatting, based on how that document was manipulated in its lifetime before you’ve tried to use it in creating an ad.

When this happens, you’ve got several choices.

First, you can highlight all the text in your ad, then click the “Remove Formatting” button at the top of the rich text control. It’s a picture of something which could, I suppose, be an eraser.

Second, if that doesn’t work, please consider the trade-off in real world terms between your fussing and fiddling with our rich text box and simply clearing the text and typing it from scratch, sans any of the garbage your other application might have added to the mix. No offense to your other application, but if it involves wasting time, unless your ad is longer than War and Peace, you’re really better off typing the text and moving on with your life. In our experience, 95% of the time, “Paste from Word” does its job perfectly well, and no hand typing is necessary in cases where the original ad copy is available in Microsoft Word.

It’s also been our experience, just so you know, that 78% of all statistics quoted on web sites are completely made up, so your mileage may vary.

As you make changes in the rich text box (or boxes), you can click the “Save” button, characterized as a small diskette at the top of the text area. If you don’t execute a Save, your ad copy will not be lost, but will not be dynamically updated in the preview picture of the ad. Should you proceed through all your text entry and move on to previewing the ad, giving it a name, and viewing a PDF version of the ad, don’t worry – your copy will be automatically saved before the system proceeds to the review step.

The preview picture may contain a watermark - that watermark will of course not be present in your final ad image.