In April 2011, our ad replacement company up and shut down without so much as a week's notice, leaving us high and dry to find a suitable replacement as quickly as possible. We stream our four Central Minnesota radio stations with Liquid Compass, who called me right away with two options. One of them was AdsWizz, a third-party company Liquid Compass was closely integrating with its streaming network.

We were one of the first station groups in the Liquid Compass network to be integrated with AdsWizz, and the transition was seamless. Liquid Compass took care of importing and re-scheduling all our campaigns, banners and video pre-rolls from our previous system into AdsWizz Audio Advertiser.

Learning to use the system was easy for me since I'm familiar with the OpenX Ad Delivery platform. My own experience aside, for a newcomer looking in, it can be pretty daunting to understand the terminology and workflow. That said, give it a couple weeks and you'll be a master.

The workflow

AdsWizz runs on what I could call a hierarchy workflow. It starts with an advertiser. Inside each advertiser, campaigns are scheduled. Inside each campaign, ads are uploaded. Inside each ad, zones for delivery are scheduled. From the top down, it looks like this:

Advertiser → Campaign → Ads → Zones

You can have as many campaigns running as you'd like from a single advertiser, and each of those campaigns can have its own set of flight dates. Each campaign can have as many ads in it and each ad inside that campaign can be scheduled and targeted accordingly.

As far as ads go, we use three types: audio, video and display.
> Audio ads are delivered to our listeners whenever the radio station takes a break on-air. When that happens, the stream cuts away and plays a different set of commercials delivered by AdsWizz.
> Video ads are scheduled as a pre-roll (15 to 20 seconds each) and are played before the Web stream starts.
> Display ads are linked to audio ads. When the audio ad plays during a commercial break, the corresponding display ad is shown in the stream player to allow the listener to click on the banner to follow some sort of call to action from the audio. This linking process is determined by a simple check box set at the campaign level called Companion Positioning. Once checked, the system will automatically pair any display ads with the audio ads scheduled in the same campaign.

Targeting and scheduling

AdsWizz is one of the most advanced systems that I have used over the years in terms of its ability to target and schedule media to various sources. Like I mentioned earlier, each campaign can have as many ads inside it as you'd like. Each ad can be individually scheduled or targeted, or you can have every ad follow the schedule set at the campaign level, which trickles down to each ad unless overwritten.

Ads can be delivered to any number of stations (zones). I can theoretically have a campaign with a unique spot for each radio station inside of it. As for targeting, each ad can individually be delivered based on date, time, day of week, etc. This is pretty basic scheduling and day-parting functionality.

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