Ad Manager
Adding Value Through Digital Signage
With Both Tap TV and Our Music Video Jukeboxes now occupying televisions in the locations. We wanted to offer venues the ability to quickly create and run self promotional ads.
Research
While advertising is not a new capability for our products, Automating the development and deployment was. It was extremely labor intensive for a developer to deploy a single ad across the entire network & devices. We also wanted to homogenize the experience across the devices.
Defining the Problems & Strategy
We broke down the problem into several successive discovery Components.
- Technology
- Jukebox(modded headless ie7), TapTV (unity based playback), & Our Network administration web application
- What could these promotions look like.(motion graphics, video, duration)
- Audience
- Whom would create these Ad Promotions
- What value will they Gain from it.
- What will the Patron expect of the experience
- What should these Ads do
- what problems are they solving
- What are the tools we have access to through the current administration tool
Drawing Inspiration
Internally I called it a meme generator for happy hours. Working closely with engineering in Chicago to understand the current constraints our administrative web services. We established some guiding constraints and hard requirements to work with the existing system. After several rounds of iterations with internal stake holders. I built a static HTML prototype to establish a proof of concept before handing everything over to the Chicago team for full blown system integration.
Building a deep library.
Working with the game and art department we established a set of goals & constraints for the advertising to hit. It became a core value that each template be populated with useful text to help the user in vision how they could use the tool. For production We then repurposed a tool for mapping our game sprites to now generate a JSON file describing coordinates, font-family, sizes, and colors for the actual ad manager application to import.
Final Product & Reception
The end product was well received by our sales team and our already established clients. It quickly became the leading value we provided to locations outside of our entertainment features. Providing an important visible new role for our jukeboxes could bring to locations.
