AdDaptive Intelligence:
Your favorite extension

AdDaptive Intelligence is a B2B advertising agency that combines offline business data with proprietary targeting to help their clients reach the ideal audiences. Setfive and AdDaptive have been long term partners through one re-brand and several changes in their business.

One of the routine tasks that AdDaptive account managers have to do is email their clients a screenshot of ads on live sites. Understandably this was becoming a time sink, because account managers were either photoshopping ads into screenshots or refreshing a site until they got the ad. After hearing this workflow we decided there had to be a better way to do this.

• Because different AdDaptive clients advertised on different publisher sites, we needed a solution that would work on an arbitrary site. Additionally, some human input was required in order to display the ad in the correct unit on the site.
• We wanted the solution to be integrated with the AdDaptive platform so that account managers could tap into the campaigns and creatives they had already configured and uploaded.
• Due to the volume of screenshots, the solution needed to be fast and require the fewest number of clicks.

Given the requirements and use cases we decided that building a private Chrome Extension would be the best approach.

• Because Chrome Extensions run locally in Chrome, the extension can load any page that an account manager can, detect where the ad units are, and allow them to select a unit to replace with the target ad. This setup avoided having to set up any infrastructure like a proxy to load 3rd party sites within our web app.
• Since Chrome Extensions are built in JavaScript with access to a full HTTP API we were able to load data from our existing API endpoints and reuse some of our JavaScript logic to retrieve relevant campaign and creative data.
• All of the ad replacement and screenshots were processed on the account manager's browser, so there was no queueing or resource contention between account managers. Additionally, we designed the process to require as few clicks or keystrokes as possible. This allowed account managers to create screenshots much more efficiently than before.

The extension was a hit among the account managers! It saves them time (and avoids some boredom), which allows them to tackle other high value tasks.

Overall, one takeaway from this project was that Chrome Extensions are a powerful and often overlooked platform.