CricInfo India MediaKit

Your ad can appear under a wide variety of classifications:

Any specific country (e.g. Indians in India, *.in)
Everywhere across the world, all the time (Run of site)
On any specific site (e.g. India site)
On any particular type of content related page (e.g., Sharjah Cup Pages)
Everywhere except a specified group of sites (e.g., not on England site)
On any mirror server or mirror cluster (e.g., India servers)
During certain times slots, i.e, prime time, or other peak periods
Running on a particular day of the week, or during specific periods
Any combination of the above.

CricInfo uses Adlib - a sophisticated advertisement serving software package which was developed to provide advertisers with a range of advertisement serving options. Adlib has all the advanced features. Features like targeting, reporting, tuning, and dynamic serving of ads have been built in for effective exposure of adverts to the CricInfo users.

Adverts are not fixed to specific pages of the site for fixed periods of time. Advertisements areserved dynamically. The following explanation gives an idea of how an advert (Banner/Spot) is served by Adlib.

When a request is received from a user, the following information is parsed to the adserver

Page URL being accessed
Host IP number of the browser (or proxy)
The advert type being requested (banner, spot)

Based on this information the server builds a list of current campaigns, compares this list with the data specific to this request, namely, campaign type, the page URL, mirror site/cluster (server), time of day, day of week and builds a secondary list of campaigns, performs a reverse DNS/domain table lookup on the browser IP, calculate a "score" for that campaign, and the creative is chosen from the campaign based on the frequency of the creatives and served to the user.

Since the adverts are served dynamically, a user may or may not see a particular advert when he loads the page. There is a chance that the user might not see the advert at all since the request for that advert might be coming from a different computer/IP which fulfils the Adlib serving criteria.

The various targeting options are explained below.

Domain Targeting

Adverts can be targeted to a specific audience residing in a country/domain. If you want to target Indians residing in India, the campaign will be targeted to appear on *.in domain. CricInfo guarantees the exposure of adverts to the specific audience by giving access to the reports to the advertiser. For details on reports, please check the tracking section for a simulated version.

City/town targeting

Since Adlib can track the requests from specific cities/towns (sub domains) within a Domain, adverts can be targeted to these places. Please check with us for the cities/towns that can be targeted.

Mirror Targeting

CricInfo has 30 Mirror servers across the world and this is another targeting possibility that a client can explore. If a campaign is targeted to a specific mirror or a mirror cluster, let us assume Indian mirror servers - the user will be able to see the advert irrespective of the domain he comes from. For e.g. a person from the Gulf region can log on to the Ind mirror and can see the adverts that are targeted on the Ind mirrors. Likewise, he can also see the adverts that are targeted to the Gulf domain. The user is given a choice of mirror servers to log on to the site, which is usually the nearest mirror server that is recommended for faster downloads.

Page Targeting

The adverts can be set to appear on the particular page or section. This is usually taken in combination with either domain targeting or mirror targeting. For feature/tournament sponsorship, this would be ideal for branding and exposure to specific audience during a match or a tournament.

Time of Day

This option is used to expose adverts to the desired audience during a particular time of the day. For e.g., this could be during office hours (9 to5) if you want to target the audience during this time. The advertiser can specify any time of the day to expose the adverts.

Day of Week

Adverts can also be targeted to appear on specific day(s) of the week. This option can be set for adverts that are topical in nature and needs exposure on specific days. This can also be taken as a combination with Domain, Mirror, and Page targeting.