Case study: New America Media

The background
New America Media is the largest ethnic publisher association in America. They help minority publishers optimise their advertising inventory by connecting them with companies that NAM has existing relationships with, including AT&T, Compaq and P&G. New America Media began running OpenX nine months ago, and by granting their publishers access to it, have enabled them to manage their own ad campaigns. In essence, one OpenX installation is able to serve a sophisticated network of publishers and advertisers.

Why OpenX?
“We have been using OpenX to manage our network from day one. I’m a big open source junky and I have a lot of respect for the quality of the product,” explains NAM’s IT Director, Austin Heap. “I’ve been following OpenX since it was phpAdsNew, and I had some experience of using OpenX at my last job. We’re a non-profit organization so open source falls in line with our organizational philosophy. We know what alternatives are available to us but we’ve chosen OpenX.”

Set up and installation
Austin is in charge of the cluster of servers that run OpenX and was responsible for the initial installation and set up. “It was very, very easy,” says Austin. “When I installed OpenX, I had to tweak a couple of things for our setup but it was up and running in its final form within 20 minutes. It was shockingly straightforward to set up, particularly in comparison to some of the very expensive software we have and I’ve spent the last 72 hours debugging!

“For the most part, OpenX is designed for experienced set up; it is set up for your basic Linux cluster. I really haven’t had to customise it much at all.”

Features
NAM’s Internet Marketing Director, Jaski Singh, discusses the features, “Honestly, it has a lot of great features but what’s nice is that the whole interface is definitely more convenient than in the earlier versions. Right now geotargeting is the most relevant feature as far as I’m concerned.”

“Being able to give our publishers access to real time reporting is definitely another beneficial feature, and for the huge campaigns for very big clients, giving access to a consolidated end report is key. Overall OpenX gives us the ability to serve each market in a very targeted and controlled manner and to do this on a scalable level,” adds Austin.

Inventory
“We’ve definitely seen an improvement in our inventory situation in the nine months since we began using OpenX,” says Jaski. “We started with some of the smaller publications, but in the last six months or so we’ve had some big campaigns and that has drawn the attention of the larger publications. There has been a huge jump in the inventory already but we are at the limit of our human resources capacity right now - the last six to nine days really ramped up much faster than we expected. We have made a conscious decision not to increase our inventory yet. However, once this campaign is over, we’ll give it another push and I expect our inventory to grow significantly within the next two weeks.”

“OpenX is a dream”
Austin sums up, “I would say that from a tech stand point, when you’re trying to manage an organization and you’re in charge of the communications infrastructure, every little thing has to operate at a very high degree of stability. I can’t devote a lot of time to any one thing and OpenX is probably one of the most stable things that we run. Compared to everything else, OpenX is a dream.”