New Banner Ad format seals deal with Rural King

Amplified Media, owned by Lee Enterprises had a problem to solve:  A major national retail advertiser, Rural King, wanted to rotate multiple price/item deals on home and farm products dynamically through its schedule of banner ads, creating a potential production nightmare.

“[Amplified] called us in a panic to see if we could create inventory banners that rotated through different types of product inventory without a feed… The retailer has more than 20,000 products,” said Kevin Collins, VP of sales and marketing for Wehaa.

The solution was simple and elegant:  Wehaa repurposed a banner ad solution designed to display changing real estate and used car inventory for the retail project.

The format has been extremely popular with brokers and automotive dealers, as a way to seamlessly change ads to reflect new inventory in virtually real time, as the inventory is updated from the website overnight.

Rural King, who sells everything from spray paint to crossbows, liked plan and booked a large schedule.

Some ads run just one item, rotating through the sale inventory. Others ads run five or more items.

All are linked to the product pages on Rural King’s website and synched with the website so that if a product is sold out it is removed overnight.

“Most items are not running out, but we are also able to filter if they want to have a flash sale, or promote pet supplies. We can sort the products and slice it and dice it any way they want to do it,”  Collins said.

Find a selection of the ads here. This format used standard IAB sizes, but they can be created in any size.

The price-item ads can now be set up for any industry, from furniture stores to grocery stores, designed to pull off any slice of inventory or rotate through the products, Collins said.