Intela and IPV6

As a global provider of digital marketing products, we at Intela are acutely aware of the diminishing pool of IP addresses for our customers. While there is a standard to support IPV6 and transitional IPV4/6 hybrid addresses, not all legacy networks and routers currently support the naming and routing changes required to pass traffic. We are working to position our infrastructure to support both IPV4 and IPV6 so the transit paths of our customer marketing offers flow freely now and in the future.

How Did We Get Here?

In 1981, the IPV4 standard was approved. The standard provides numerical addresses formatted as 111.111.111.111 and supports 4.29 billion different address combinations that could be allocated and used by companies to support global networking. What was imagined at that time was a set of numbers that would never be fully utilized. Fast forward 30 years: with the unprecedented growth of the Internet, mobile devices, smart TVs, etc., the IPV4 address pool was exhausted on February 3, 2011. Anticipating this growth, a new standard was established: IPV6. IPV6 has 340 Undecillion (3.4E+38) addresses, which is anticipated to last for some time. But with a new standard comes some confusion, as IPV6 addresses are in hexidecimal.

Making Sense of IPV6 Addresses

IPV6 is an impending reality; by now, the familiar format of an IPV4 address is second nature, but reading an IPV6 address is just as easy despite its appearance.

Here’s an IPV4 address: 192.168.1.1

This is the format most people are familiar with. It’s all numbers, and there are four octets and no shorthand.

Here’s an IPV6 address: 2002:0ab8:0000:0000:0000:ff00:0042:1234

Very different – and harder to remember. Fortunately, IPV6 implements a number of techniques that allow one to shorten these addresses, based on a few simple rules:

1. Remove one or more leading zeros from one or more groups of hexidecimal digits.
   • The above example becomes 2002:ab8:0:0:0:ff00:42:1234
2. Omit one or more consecutive sections of zeroes, using a double colon (::) in their place.
   • Note: this abbreviation can only be used once in an address
   • The above address becomes 2002:0ab8::ff00:0042:1234
3. You can combine the techniques to shorten the address.
   • The above address becomes 2002:ab8::ff00:42:1234

Using these techniques, we can even shorten the localhost address of 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001 to ::1, which is often the shorthand one will see.

Further Reading

• Understand IPv6 Addresses
• Google’s IPV6 Page

Post by: Matt Mensch, Senior Systems Administrator

Being an Affiliate Manager is a bit like putting together a puzzle. You have many components of the puzzle which are hundreds of publishers and offers. Somehow you have to put all these pieces together for the best outcome possible, revenue. In order to make it all work you have to know what traffic you have: What countries, what types of traffic, what payouts will work and what verticals. Seems easy enough but when you factor in how many offers there are, managing epc’s and publisher’s expectations, caps on offers, and constant communication with your team it can be a handful. When you have just parts of the puzzle you have to improvise and see how you can make the puzzle pieces fit.

You can’t limit yourself to just a couple of countries or traffic types. You may be missing out on a massive chunk of revenue from contextual traffic on an Italian casino sign up to display traffic on a Saudi Arabian mobile pin submit. You need to be open. This is why constant communication and presenting offers to your publishers is a must.  There is always something new we can learn from talking to our pubs. What new ventures they’re looking at for the current quarter or for the next year. We all know the same old same old offers that work but we’re always looking for the next big offer that will may last for up to a couple of years.

The set it and forget it offers are always a plus but they are never that easy. You should always be watching your epc’s and knowing what targets your pubs need in order to continue running your offers. Otherwise they will go to another network to run the same offer. Gotta know your offers and your pubs and it will all fit together in some shape or form.

This industry moves fast so that getting info from your pubs to your sales team to find the offers has to be a quick process. There is paperwork and set up time involved also so you need the help of your entire office to not miss out on something that could be making money immediately.  Weekly meetings always help us at Intela. We get to talk about what is working currently, what we need and what is coming out next so we can plan the rest of your month/quarter to hit revenue goals.

All in all, my team makes it work and we look forward to the newest and greatest ways to convert offers and ensure the best return for our clients and partners in this wacky industry.

Post by: Mona Readio, Affiliate Manager

It’s been a manic month for Intela both in the office and on the road. In September, Intela was represented (exhibiting or attending) at conventions in Cologne Germany for the dmexco, Paris France for the E-Commerce show, Utrecht Netherlands for ROI Wednesday, and the ad:tech show in London. We’ve been racking up the air miles and meeting lots of new faces on our journeys and hope to carry our momentum into the final quarter of 2012.

Intela’s stand at the London ad:tech was buzzing nonstop for the two-day event this year. Even though the show seemed to be smaller overall, Intela was kept busy throughout and even had to call in backup from the office to come be on hand to greet visitors and meet clients.  Overall, ad:tech proved to still be one of Intela’s most critical shows in the UK and will hopefully continue to be in the future.

The Intela team was out in force with account managers, country managers and salespeople representing every European country that Intela is active in. The hot topic of the show was mobile traffic, which Intela is making a priority going in to 2013. We’re making a concerted effort to track all of our user data into the devices and platforms that they are most consistently opening email on. We’re also making big strides with new partners who specialise in mobile content, WAP promotion on a performance basis.

We have found that over 60% of our database have viewed Intela’s campaigns on mobile devices this year, with a significant portion of those viewing more than half the time on mobile devices.  This has led us to build out our own internal properties to support iOS, Android, Blackberry OS, and more to come soon. We are also actively helping our clients to optimise their creative and pages for mobile viewing and targeting our mailings to that mobile data. Helping clients to understand the opportunities that exist in mobile promotion is leading to much better ROI for many of our CPL and CPA campaigns.

In the aftermath of Ad:tech, the team has been scrambling to catch up with and get ahead of the game. There is lots to be done as we enter the final quarter of 2012 and much to look forward to in 2013.

Post by: Jay Andrews, European Head of Account Management

When the commercial interruption replaced sponsored programming on television, David Ogilvy reacted:

“I am angered to the point of violence by the commercial interruption of the programs. Are the men who own the television stations so greedy that they cannot resist such intrusive affronts to the dignity of man?” David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1963

In our day and age we have gone from tolerant to immune to advertising messages we are shown. In the digital landscape ads are presented in very intelligent ways, pushing adverts across different channels and pacing messages depending on the position in the conversion funnel.

When running campaigns a brand should always consider reaching enough potential prospects, but also adding adequate intelligence in the process of conversion. This could mean using data to target different behaviors, engage in a two-way direction through incentives or promotions or understanding whether it’s time to replace an ad with a survey.

Further exploring the targeting aspect we all know there’s plenty of information stored in cookies, but what happens if you are using a shared device? You end up reading an article about last Sunday football match when a banner distracts you presenting the latest female shoes collection! Is it subliminal messaging from your partner or cookies limitations?

The quest on moving away from targeting machines to targeting user “intent” depends on the ability to observe user behavior from a more holistic point of view, bringing together pieces of information such as current page, referral and where users clicks next. Plus, the “holy grail” for advertisers in making sense of intent data is “involvement”, such as actions, newsletter subscription, registration for a trial and eventually purchase. On the other hand, it is also true that portable devices (such mobiles and tablets) are less exposed to the cookie dilemma. In fact, they are more personal and rarely shared.

Targeting techniques should also be ideally matched to content personalization. That way specific segments of users will be also not only reached by different ad messages but they will also experience different content when landing on the page. In a competitive online landscape, competitors are just a click away, hence a smooth and enticing user experience is essential. Ensuring the delivery of relevant content to match user expectation and impressing them positively plays a pivotal role in acquiring and retaining new consumers. Similar data could be used to carry out content targeting, such as demographic data, explicit preferences, analytics data, social graph, etc.

The opportunity given by targeting techniques and technologies should be carefully assessed by organization when choosing partners. The ability to collect comprehensive data points is key, however, the ability to create a unique vision of the interaction and meaning across those data points is paramount.

Intela has definitely the former, the latter depends on the close collaboration between the agency and the client, in order to fully understand campaign goals and strategize the execution through meaningful use of available data.

Post by: Filippo Gallignani, Online Properties and Innovation Director