Q. What are the benefits of using Immedium for online advertising?
A. Immedium makes it possible to run real-time advertising campaigns using rich media, whereby advertisers can easily change the contents of animated multimedia ads at any time during a campaign. That makes it possible to 'fine tune' an ad while in flight, or to alert audiences to short term or limited marketing opportunities that can't easily be promoted using conventional text or banner advertising.  In short, Immedium is a creative tool that enables your business to realize its maximum revenue potential, whatever your industry.

Q. What's an example of a business that would benefit from this service?
A. Any business that uses online advertising can benefit from Immedium. By using the system's inbuilt metrics to monitor performance, marketers can immediately see how changes to advertising content affect click-through rate. Immedium charts show impressions and CTR overlaid with the exact timing of content adjustments, enabling a campaign to be optimized in real-time to ensure maximum return on the dollars spent. In addition, any business that provides time-sensitive products, services, or promotions, can benefit from Immedium. For example, airlines, hotels, resorts, concert promoters, event organizers, and sports promoters can use Immedium to maximize occupancy rates and avoid lost opportunities. Real estate brokers and recruitment firms can use Immedium to advertise specific properties and employment opportunities in real time. Music publishers can use Immedium to promote their hottest artists, live events, and current releases. Banks and institutions operating in the financial markets can advertise current savings rates, mortgages, currency rates etc.

Q. Can Immedium reach mobile users as well as conventional desktops?
A. Yes. With support for both HTML/JavaScript and Adobe Flash banners, Immedium is cross-platform compatible, enabling advertisers to deliver animated and editable content to all kinds of users, including Apple iPads and iPhones.

Q. How is the ad content updated?
A. Content revision is performed online either manually by authorized staff using a standard web browser, or automatically, for instance via integration of Immedium with a business database such as a database of properties for sale, a ticket booking system, or a financial database.

Q. Do I need to download software to operate Immedium?
A. No. All you need to operate Immedium is a standard browser with the Flash player plugin, and an Internet connection. You can access your account from the office or when travelling.

Q. Can advertisers in other countries use Immedium?
A. Yes - the entire system operates online and there are no barriers to international usage. Regardless of your location, you can open an Immedium account and use it to manage real-time ads in your domestic online media, or media outlets in other countries.

Q. What languages does Immedium support?
A. Immedium has been designed and built to support ads whose content may be in any language. Even Asian languages with extensive fonts such as Chinese and Japanese can be edited in real time, with full flexibility. All Immedium ads have the ability to detect the viewer's preferred language, and can be coded to show content accordingly. The Immedium user console has been designed with a multi-language user interface, commencing with support for English and Japanese.

Q. How much does it cost to use Immedium?
A. Immedium's pricing varies from country to country but typically operates on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model, similar to the structure that many publishers use. Please contact us for details.

Q. How can I create real-time ads with the Immedium platform?
A. Any competent developer in Adobe Flash® or HTML/JavaScript can build ads compatible with Immedium, following the guidelines and including scripts that we provide with your account. No database knowledge is required. Alternatively, you can commission one of Immedium's authorized development partners to create an ad to your specification.

Q. What size of ads are supported?
A. There are no technical limits regarding the size and format of ads that can be created and managed in Immedium. However, most online media adopt a few standard banner ad sizes and it's important to determine placement and sizing before commencing ad design.

Q. What is the development environment for creating live ads?
A. Advertisers can choose between using Adobe Flash® and ActionScript 2, or open source HTML/CSS/JavaScript as their development environment. Immedium provides scripts and samples ads in both environments.

Q. What kind of dynamic content can be included?
A. Dynamic content can include text, images, colors, graphics, audio clips, video clips, database searches, user input, fonts - almost anything. It's entirely up to the imagination of the creative team and the skills of the developer. Conversely, any element can also be fixed, and the scope of variables limited to one or more specific fields, or a choice of pre-defined alternatives.

Q. How can I test ads that I build independently?
A. By uploading your ad to the inventory inside your Immedium account, you can quickly determine if it is working correctly and displaying your edited content, prior to publication on the world wide web. Some testing can also be done offline.

Q. Can Immedium be used to develop sequenced ads?
A. Yes. Immedium ads can easily be programmed to show different content each time they are viewed at a particular device, enabling advertisers to develop a sequenced campaign of ads that tell a story or lead to a defined conclusion.

Q. What components of an ad can be updated?
A. Anything that has been defined as a variable element in the ad design. See "What kind of dynamic content can be included?" above.

Q. What skills are needed to update ads once they are running?
A. No special technical skills are required, just ordinary office administrative skills.

Q. How can I be sure that the changes I make are correct prior to publication?
A. All editing is performed within the inventory, which is a private area inaccessible to public web users. You can review the updated content and adjust if necessary prior to publication to the world wide web. Users with 'editor' privilege can update content in the inventory, but only 'master' users have the power to publish, providing additional safeguards.

Q. How long does it take to update an ad?
A. Only as long as it takes to log on, select the ad, edit it, save and publish. About a minute.

Q. Is the revised content immediately available to web users?
A. Yes. Any visitor to a web site hosting the ad will see the revised content. Pages that are already displaying the ad may need to be refreshed.

Q. Can the updating be automated?
A. Absolutely. Linking live advertising collateral to a business system such as a SQL database is the ultimate advertising solution. Always accurate, timely, and relevant, without the need for manual intervention. Immedium ads built in this way can run indefinitely yet always stay current.

Q. Is Immedium an ad-serving network?
A. Immedium is designed to be a reliable source of ads and associated content to publishers, who typically have their own mechanisms for trafficking and distribution. As an independent provider of technology we work with any publisher or ad-serving network. However, we can also act as a host if required.

Q. Where is Immedium’s server located?
A. Our dedicated server is located within the continental USA, with excellent global connectivity. We also use Amazon's CloudFront content delivery network, which provides access via distributed edge locations with low latency and very high availability.

Q. Can Immedium ads be hosted and served by 3^rd parties?
A. Yes. This is the usual case. Ads created with Immedium are HTML files or Adobe Flash files in .swf format and hence are compatible with all popular ad-serving technologies. So advertisers can continue to use the ad delivery and tracking systems they have in place, using Immedium as a creative and editing tool and a host of variable content.

Q. How scalable is the Immedium ad server?
A. Immedium is deployed on a high performance, wholly dedicated server configuration which has both very high availability and capacity. The system configuration is further scalable as needs dictate to handle increasing loads. We gain significant additional leverage by harnessing the power of cloud computing to distribute multimedia files using Amazon's global network of edge locations - 'CloudFront'. CloudFront provides elastic scalability with huge capacity, so that we can confidently meet our customers' business goals, wherever their markets.

Q. Can Immedium serve dynamic ads to mobile phones, tablets, and PDAs?
A. Absolutely. See above.

Q. What statistics are collected by Immedium?
A. Currently the system builds a historical timeseries of metrics which shows activity by campaign and distribution channel, including charting of impressions and click-through rates that can be used to compare the relative effectiveness of various media and ad campaigns. We also capture data on individual clicks which we use to build metrics on user location, primary language, unique accesses, browser type etc.

Q. Can Immedium track changes to advertising content over a period of time?
A. Yes, and this is a unique benefit that is extremely powerful. We maintain a history of the variable content published to each distribution channel, which we integrate with the metrics collected on performance. Advertisers can see at a glance how ads perform immediately before and after a content adjustment.

Q. How secure is Immedium?
A. We take the issue of security very seriously as we understand the risk of unauthorized access to a user account. Our server is hardened at many levels to prevent spammers and brute force login attacks from disrupting service. We deploy a comprehensive software security and optimization suite which includes an advanced firewall, spam filter, virus detector, and mechanisms to guard against HTTP intrusion and denial of service attacks. We enforce Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption between browser and server on all communications, including password login. In addition, user passwords are encrypted for storage on the server. Upon user login, a welcome message shows the date of the last login as an additional check.

All communications with the server are subject to validation and user confirmation prior to being acted upon, and we have three levels of access for each account, with varying privileges. We take additional steps to safeguard the security of users’ assets and prevent abuse.