Within ShopLocal’s SmartCircular suite of solutions, there are two main options that retail advertisers pick from. A more simple SmartCircular 2.0 site or a more engaging and feature rich SmartCircular 4.1 site.
Coming soon to clients that are currently using the SmartCircular 2.0 solution for their weekly ads is a entirely rebuilt from the ground up animated page turning component. With this new Adobe Flex/Flash based animated circular page turning component (that internally here at ShopLocal is called the hybrid movie), the following are some of the key benefits that this new release delivers on (in no particular order):
- Deep integration into ShopLocal’s publisher ad server (DFP) so that those retailers that choose to deploy display ads around the content within their circular site, every possible page view generated by users can now have a banner ad served, thereby maximizing revenue generation
- Much improved web analytic integration and event queuing/firing mechanisms which will have higher accuracy in some fringe use cases
- New smart page slider bar with visual look ahead and progress bar meter. Also this page slider bar dynamically appears below really long circular pages to help with vertical page scroll usability issues
- Re-worked back end data integration so that the robust SDAPI is now powering the animated page turning experience
- Rollover impression tracking is enabled automatically and will aide wisdom of the crowds accuracy rates
- Reduced ongoing maintenance costs for both ShopLocal and the retailer
- Quicker time to market for any new features that either ShopLocal or the retailer wants to deploy
For a look at one of first clients to have this deployed to, check out Big 5 Sporting Goods SmartCircular 2.0 site
Here is the front cover of a circular being displayed within the updated animated page turning component. Notice the enhanced UI of the page turning component and the addition of a page slider bar.
Here is a spread or two page view with the page slider visual look ahead feature engaged. This will allow users to get a better idea of what is contained within an specific page without first having to actual turn there.
Meijer yesterday unleashed a real great addition to their weekly ad site called Full Screen browsing. Just like a YouTube video when maximized that takes over every inch of a user’s monitor, now when browsing the circular a user can see the largest possible circular page images. It also reduces all of the noise that comes with a full site header, footer and browser menus and toolbars. All of this clutter instantly disappears within full screen browsing. It does make for a more enjoyable, simpler experience.
This will really help improve the readability factor that from time to time be an issue for some users. The only constraint that is inherent to utilizing this type of Adobe Flash player type full screen presentation style is that any keyboard inputs of any kind cancel / end the full screen browsing experience.
Within the typical browse by circular page view that most shoppers choose to use, a new view option has been added called Full Screen.
Once full maximized, everything included the browser bar and skin is covered up. All that remains is just the weekly ad pages. This offers a great, simplified and focused user interface that excels at text readability within the circular.
To help drive awareness and traffic to local market ROP advertisers, Canwest and ShopLocal are launching a new a new product called ‘Zoom To My Ad’. Essentially this expandable Adobe Flex based display ad grabs a set of random ROP advertisers to feature every single impression that it is served. It was built in a way to use the standard IAB display ad inventory, which will allow Canwest to serve these ‘Zoom To My Ad’ promotions through their standard publisher ad server.
Unexpanded leaderboard featuring a random selection of ROP ads for a specific Canwest newspaper web site
Expanded leaderboard which dynamically re-sizes its vertical dimension to adjust to the size & format of the ROP ad that is being "zoomed" to
Ahh, the wonders of the WebTop. In this new hybrid space between the browser and desktop there are some really interesting use cases continuing to grow. Web developers are now able to easily create installed software that sits on user’s local machines. Toys “R” Us is one of the first to push into this space with their “Desktop Widget”. Although much simpler than the vision that the ShopLocal team has of this technology, it does the job in pushing the localized “best of” store promotions in front of some of the more loyal and engaged Toys “R” Us shoppers.
It's a great example of how localized weekly ad content can be extended beyond the browser and into a fun and easy to use desktop interface.
This Adobe AIR built widget features:
- Synchronized local content with the live weekly ad site via the SmartDelivery API
- Browse by category of interest
- View store details such as address, phone and hours of operation
- Linkage back into the store finder and weekly ad sites
- After entering your ZIP code (just one time as the application retains this info), the user is asked to make an initial category of interest selection (which is also remembered upon subsequent use).
After entering your ZIP code (just one time as the application retains this info), the user is taken to whatever category they picked. In this case, the user is looking at electronic deals taken from the weekly ad which auto scroll every 5 seconds.
By "puling down" on the change category menu, a user can select which category best suites their needs or interest and the widget will refresh with weekly ad content from that specific slice.
By "flipping" the desktop widget over, one can view the store details of where the deals being shown are applicable at and also change their location by entering a new ZIP code.
Target continues a long trend of constant iteration with their most recent release of the online weekly ad site. The most notable new features that were part of this update were:
- Enhanced Product Rollovers: Usually the rollovers that appear within a SmartCircular site follow the mouse cursor. We have now finally broken this old “rule” so that the rollovers do not move around. Rather when the rollovers appear, they have a static position that actually allows a user to interact within the rollover.
- Print A Single Item Of Interest: Offers a simple and well formatted, printer ready view of the product.
- Share (via AddThis.com integration): Creates an easy conduit for a user to re-post an item of interest to many leading social networking and/or bookmarking sites.
So from a standard browse by circular page view...
...a user can trigger a product rollover to appear and then choose to interact with three different calls to action: View Details, Print or Share.
By clicking on the print option, the user is taken to a printer friendly HTML popup
By clicking on Share, the user is taken to a AddThis.com hosted HTML popup layer that enables the item of interest to be shared across a host of social networking sites as well as saves as a bookmark within some bookmarking type sites.
(4.00 out of 5)
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