SocialAds delivering Advertisements to TV Screens, Digital Signages & Kiosks

Alright! Let's get started. First, we need to get our server-side infrastructure setup. Then we will go about setting up your various Client side displays. 

Setting up SocialAds for Large screen Ad delivery

The first thing to do is decide what kind of Ads you want to show. For Large screen Ads, High-quality image Ads, as well as videos, can work well - However Audio might not always be possible in a Public location. You can also show Text Ads. In this example, I am going to setup my Zones in such a way that I can have some of My client screens showing Full-Screen Ads & some of them showing 3 Ads at a time on the screen. 

Lets setup the Zones

Login to the SocialAds installation & in the backend setup a Media Ad Zone with high-resolution dimensions - check your client screen resolution to decide how much this might be. Also, set up the File size limitation as needed. Since I am doing to be seeing this on a TV in our office, I am going to set it up to be 1280 X 768 px. This I will use on the Client devices that are going to show 1 full-screen ad at a time. 

Setup the Content Page with the Zone for delivery

Now Lets setup the Page on the website where you have SocialAds that will actually render the Ads. For this, create a new Joomla Content Article & use the load module position syntax to define a new module position that I am going to call 'fshdads' . Now create a new SocialAds module & publish it in this position. Configure the module to show the Zone we just created above & set it to not show the module title. You can also configure other stuff like not showing the advertise here link & switching on Ad rotation. One page is now ready to go live on the client side. 

Now you can set up the rest of the zones. I am going to make 3 more Zones now for the Clients that will show 3 Ads at a time. One Zone is Large & covers most of the screen. The second one is on its right & is a tower ad & the final one is a small text Ad zone that I will show on the bottom. Configure the dimensions as appropriate for your screen & then set up a new Joomla page as above & put the 3 module positions there as described above. If you want more permutations, you can do more. 

Configuring the Clients

Our current assumption is that whatever device you have on the client side, it can render Web pages. Fire up its browser & open the link to the Joomla page you created in step one on it. This should show the Joomla site and the Ad in the position you defined. But this won't work as the rest of the site is showing as well. 

Let's fix that by adding a parameter tmpl=component to the end of the URL. You might need to prefix it with a & or a ?depending on how the URL is. In the demo I have set up for this, the URL is http://demos.techjoomla.com/tvads/index.php/shared-zone ( note that I have appended the string but Joomla's sef has made the URL prettier) 

If you have chrome, you can have this fire as a Desktop App & you can set it to run on startup. Configure each client in a similar way.

For the clients, it's also possible to use a Chromecast with a small hack to have a very cheap Ad delivery device. You can make the chromecast fire up a HTML file with an iframe that shows your page. You can see this link for that here. 

Hope this helps! Have fun with SocialAds & do tell us innovative ways in which you are using it as well!