Madison Advertising

Latest Features And Changes

Version 2.4

Version 2.3

The Billboard System

Application Programming Interface (API)

No Automatic Refunds Upon Termination

Profit Sharing

Help Notecard

I've built the Madison Advertising System to achieve a highest possible occupancy rate for billboards, while also achieving the best weekly rental fee. Many places have a load of unrented billboards, others are permanently booked. Madison billboards adapt their pricing to supply and demand. When your billboards are popular, the price goes up, and less premiere spots at your place may lower their price.

Another great feature may be the passive billboards you can rez at premium locations to slide show through all ads at your place, no matter their original location. Your advertisers are going to love it! There are different designs of slide show billboards included in the package.

There are 2 versions of the system: An almost free one with a 5% commission on each payment, and one with a regular price and no further payments.

Madison billboards of the same owner are networked within a region/sim.

Latest Features And Changes

Version 2.4

Custom image for available boards: Put a texture UUID in the object description field to override the default texture. For unrented boards, touch the board and select "Reset" from the menu.
Added a configuration called networked to turn off and on the interaction with other boards to align rental prices.

Version 2.3

Any script in the inventory that has not been created by the owner or me are deleted immediately.
Profit Sharing: share the profits with other avatars (commission-free version only).
Group-only rentals: The renter has to be in same group as the board.
Online indicator: Ad boards contain a plugin that tracks the online status of a renter and colors the ONLINE button green (online) or red (offline).
Passive billboards now start the slideshow at a random advertisement to avoid that all passive billboards show the same cycle.

The Billboard System

The Madison Advertising System is a set of billboards and scripts to enable a modern and responsive way of billboard advertising in Second Life. Besides the common features of Second Life billboards like loading textures, notecards and landmarks to give to consumers, the system also provides more advanced functions:

OPTIONAL price alignment to supply and demand: See below for details.
Boards that aren't rented for a period of time are lowering their weekly fees individually (period configurable).
Passive, non-rentable billboards query the rented boards and display their contents in a slide show.
While the boards are all modifiable, the package contains pre-made boards for image ratios 1:1, 4:3 and 16:9. Texturing is adapted accordingly. The billboards also run a script that maintains the aspect ratio upon resizing. Your advertisers will appreciate to know what they're dealing with.
I've tried to accomplish a fairly neutral design of the boards. Advertisements appear in a 3D frame (unlike other flat on the wall prim boards). The usual land impact of a board is 1, but since it's mesh, LI can go up when you resize.

Price Adjustment

If price adjustment is turned on, a board adjusts its weekly price, specifically:

When another board is paid, it sends a message about the revenue to all other boards in the same region. The other boards will then increase their weekly price depending on the amount of said revenue.
After a configurable timeout (default 24h), an unrented board decreases its weekly price by a configurable percentage.

Configuration

For refined configuration, drop a notecard named config into the contents of the billboard. All values have defaults, so you only need the config notecard if you want to have other values. The notecard can set the following properties:

start_price - The initial weekly rent after boot. Default: 50 L$.
reserve_price - The minimum price. The automatic price adjustment will not offer a weekly rent lower than this. Default: 10 L$.
max_price - The maximum weekly price. I recommend to set this property to a reasonable value. Default: 100 L$.
adjust_rate - Adjustment percentage for automatically decreasing the weekly rent. Default: 5%.
adjust_interval - Number of hours before lowering the weekly rent. Default: 24h.
price_adjustment - Use 1 to enable automatic price adjustment, 0 otherwise. Default: 0.
min_rental_time, max_rental_time - Number of weeks that a board can be minimally/maximally rented at one time. Defaults: 1 to 8 weeks.
group_only - Specifies whether the board can be rented by group members only (or everybody). 1 for group only, 0 for everybody. Default: 0.
networked - If you have configured price adjustment, you can configure whether or not the boards communicate with each other to adjust the prices (1 = yes, 0 = no, default: 1).

Here's an example of how the notecard should look when done:

start_price=60

reserve_price=30

max_price=100

adjust_rate=5

adjust_interval=24

price_adjustment=1

min_rental_time=1

max_rental_time=8

group_only=0

networked=1

Passive Billboards

Also included, there are passive billboards that can be rezzed at a central and exposed location. These boards are not for rent. They collect advertisement information from all rented billboards and cycle through them in a slide show. Each advertisement gets a 1 minute slot before sliding to the next. When touched, a passive board delegates the "give contents" task to the actual billboard that holds the content.

The main purpose is to give every advertiser at your place an equal opportunity to be shown at an exposed and premiere location, even if their ad board has not that kind of exposure. Passive billboards increase the value of advertising at your place.

Passive boards only show advertisements of the same aspect ratio. For example, a 4:3 passive board only shows ads being held by 4:3 rentable billboards.

Extensive Reporting

Unlike other advertisement boards, your advertisers receive useful reports, not only reminders about when the rent is due. They're told when someone clicks the board, and they'll receive daily digest reports that look similar to this:

Your MADboard at Mellor (x,y,z) expires in 26 days 23h

It has been clicked 1 times since the last report.

Total number of clicks: 1

Advertisement recipients:

**** Resident (********-12bb-4219-b694-b539292bf5d5)

Plus, if you want to do your own reporting in addition, you can easily code it yourself using the API. The built-in reporting uses the API too - no magic pass-bys.

Daily digest reports are also created when the tenant touches the info button on the board or in the menu.

Application Programming Interface (API)

The billboard scripts send linked messages to other scripts running in the same object about all major occurences in the board, specifically:

When a board is rented.
When a board's rent is extended.
When a board's rent is terminated or expired.
When someone clicked on the board.
When a payment is received.
When the board is locked or unlocked.

There's also an event every minute about the remaining rental time. Scripts that use the API will generally don't need an own recurring timer, they can just use this message.

The API has no back channel. Applications can't impact or modify the behaviour of the main script.

Possible applications for the API

Just a few examples of what scripts can do with the API:

Advanced statistics
Advanced notifications, e.g. e-mail
Connections to other systems, e.g. group inviters

There's a full permission skeleton application included in the package; it's also available here.

No Automatic Refunds Upon Termination

Madison ad boards don't support automatic refunds upon termination. Because the weekly rent may change over time, it's very hard to find a reasonable and fair amount to partially refund upon cancellation. It's also a security issue: Someone pays an ad adboard 30 L$ per week and the weekly price rises to 50 L$ due to price adjustment. Now the user terminates and gets almost 50 L$ refunded. You would have made a loss of ~20 L$. Of course it's doable to calculate the correct amount by keeping tabs on all payments, but it's complicated and error-prone. Hence, no automatic refunds.

Profit Sharing

Profit sharing is implemented as a plugin to the main script and has its own configuration notecard called config-sharing. For the 5% commission version, the plugin will share the net amount after commission is paid.

The contents of this notecard should look like this:

report=1

...

The report value tells the script whether it should send an instant message to recipients and the owner upon each payment (0 = off, 1 = on, default: 0).

The other lines consist of an agent's UUID and the percentage this agent receives when a payment to the board is made. The sharing script checks for consistency of these values: percentages MUST range from 1 to 100, and MUST NOT add up to more than 100%.

For example, if you'd want to give 10% of each payment to me, add this line:

5a856455-662d-4d49-94d6-ece783df3871=10

(This is just an example, don't do it.)

Profit sharing will go into standby mode if the configuration is empty, inconsistent or simply wrong. Any change to the inventory causes the script to re-assess its configuration.

Help Notecard

You can add a notecard named config-help to the ad board which is given out if a user selects "Help" from the board's menu. Delete any config-help notecard from the contents tab and drop your notecard in. Done.

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