Tags: 
Vox Media is one of the country’s largest and fastest growing online publishers. Their flagship site SB Nation is the nation’s preeminent network of online sports communities, attracting 25 million sports fanatics per month.
When SB Nation needed to scale its high-impact Sponsored Post ad units, the company built a specialized campaign tool that streamlines the way they’re created, managed, and trafficked.
Example of a sponsored post on SB Nation
While the tool improved efficiency and saved time for developers, it couldn’t track, report nor link the posts to banner ad campaigns. Vox Media decided to take advantage of OpenX’s customizable APIs and integrate their homegrown tool for Sponsored Posts into OpenX Enterprise, their ad server.
“Now we can create and manage custom advertisements in our campaign tool, but we use an API to create a line item on OpenX Enterprise to produce delivery and impact reports. It’s all done automatically,” explained Dusty Matthews, Vox Media’s Product Developer.
The integration also allows Vox Media to schedule companion ads. “When we create a Sponsored Post in our campaign tool, it’s assigned an ID. We can target that Sponsored Post ID through OpenX’s variable targeting so that the Sponsored Post and companion banner ads are served on the same page,” said Dusty.
Leveraging OpenX’s reporting for its campaign tool saved Vox Media time and development resources, enabling Dusty and his team to tackle new projects and innovations.
