Boulder Office Production Department

Most people at Intela might know which are the most common duties that the Production team carry out on a daily basis: uploading creatives, generating pixels and reports, alerting to possible (or most certain) fraudulent traffic, giving out test links, troubleshooting against tracking issues, setting up and making offers available to the network to generate traffic and revenue. (It is worth mentioning that someone used to say that Production “does ticket”, which, ironically, is quite true!) . However, during the last few months at Intela I have learnt that Production’s contribution to the overall business is not limited to the tasks above and that looking at things that way would convey only a partial understanding of our responsibilities. I think that one of the most crucial things that we do every day is to make sure that each request coming from the other departments we collaborate with is responded to following standardized procedures, and complies not only with the legal commitments that bind Intela to other companies (our affiliates, for instance), but also with the laws that any marketing business is required to observe.

A clear and meaningful example of this is the so-called CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. The acronym stands for “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act” and refers to the law that regulates the commercial email communications in the US. As it is quite common that offers for the North American market are brought in by the London sales team as well, it is useful to remember which are the most relevant rules an e-mail marketer has to comply with. Moreover, the EU directive on the same matter (the EU’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive of which the UK is a compliant member state) is not as strict as the US regulation in some respects.

One of the points in the CAN-SPAM Act that is worth mentioning here is that an email must contain a visible and functioning unsubscribe mechanism that allows the recipient to stop receiving further communications. The opt-out request must be honoured within 10 days and the suppression list generating from this mechanism can be only used for compliance purposes. Emails must also contain a valid, physical postal address showing where the sender is located, accurate and relevant (not misleading) from and subject line, as well as a clear label highlighting that the email is an advertisement or pointing out the presence of adult content.

I have no intention of discussing in detail such a crucial and complex matter here, I only wanted to give an idea of the importance of some details and procedures that could seem pedantic and unnecessary at first sight, but that are actually essential. Therefore, next time you want Production to upload an email creative for an offer open to the US market, don’t forget to insert all the relevant information in the ticket!

Post By: Andrea Stamile, Production Analyst

In another step to separate Intela from other online lead generation companies, Intela has developed mobile paths in 4 different countries (UK, France, Canada and Australia) with the United States coming in a few days!

The development team has leveraged our own REST API, HTML5, CSS3 and the latest JQuery Mobile framework to present some outstanding results.  We now have online properties that are fully accessible via all mobile devices and allow us to enter an untapped market.

Our development team worked very hard to get these properties out for the month of February and was a true team effort.

Prizes.co.uk : http://prizes.co.uk/landing.html?pathName=pu_ipad_mobile_v2
JeJoueJeGagne : http://jejouejegagne.com/landing.html?pathName=fr_mobile_pass
CanadianPrizes : http://canadianprizes.com/landing.html?pathName=cp_mobile_itunes
AussiePrizes : http://aussieprizes.com.au/landing.html?pathName=ap_mobile_vodafone

Great work team!

Post by: Tom Szymanski, Director of Software Management

The migration from Direct Track is well behind us just as Felicia mentioned in a previous blog post, and the production team is very glad that’s the case. Especially after last weeks Direct Track fiasco. Just on time Intela made the decision to switch to Cake.

So we’ve had Cake for a while now, and the features keep on coming. She mentioned some of the features that make Cake so good. Well there is another very powerful feature in Cake, it has been there actually for a while now: Steps.

Steps is Cake’s solution to track the user through a series of conversions. Think about it from the user’s perspective. The user goes to the landing page and does an email submit (first step), then signs up for the service (second step), and then he purchases an item (third step), and we get to track through all of them.

The offer in this case has more than one payable action, and that’s what Steps allow us to do: be paid along the way as the user converts. On top of that we can even combine different formats, we could have the two first steps on CPA, and the third one as a Revshare.

But Steps remained a bit of an enigma for us at Intela, due to the only weakness it had: the reporting. Thinking of that, Cake has recently released a new step reporting with a nice graphical interface that lets us see not only the steps reached by the lead, but also revenue, profit and cost. Best of it all the affiliates will have access to it through the affiliate platform.

So hopefully now we’ll have a lot of these coloured graphs to look at while running reports here at Intela!

Post by: Felipe Uribe, Production Analyst