AOL continues to experiment in the Internet advertising field, most recently with the beta release of Pictela Enterprise, a new platform for designing, delivering and managing "Premium Format" ad units on the Web.
Advertising agencies will be able to use Pictela's simple, guided self-service interface to manage the brand assets of their clients, and then efficiently serve them into premium online display ads.
AOL's Senior Vice President of Premium Formats, and Pictela CEO, Greg Rogers refers to Pictela as "a content management system for ads."
The new suite of advertising tools features an array of products and services to efficiently meet the needs of ad agencies running large-scale online advertising campaigns. The most important is the Pictela Management Center (PMC), a cloud-based platform for creating, delivering and analyzing Premium Format ads. The solution offers state of the art ad-serving technology and delivers content through a set of standard apps for maximum efficiency, while also supporting standalone custom apps for clients with more specialized needs. PMC supports six IAB standard ad sizes.
In addition, Picela provides Styles & Guides, which allow advertisers to design ads based on the solution's industry-proven standardized templetes and also gives them a detailed Style Guide for each layout that contains asset, application and video requirements for pre-production and design.
Pictela will also offer Reporting and Benchmarking to let users see detailed data about key metrics, including clicks, impressions, interaction rates, exposure time, interaction time and video completion. This will support third-party impression, click and engagement tags.
Finally, the suite comes with Pictela Support during its initial beta launch for training and technical support, as well as a browser-based debugging tool to ensure quality campaign delivery and standardized metrics.
Pictela Enterprise ads will be served across AOL, Advertising.com and other major online publishers.