We officially launched AdCentral February 5th, 2021 and today we are releasing our first public update. If you are a software nerd like me, you understand the excitement and nervousness that goes into releasing an iteration with real stores in our platform! While the worst case is not whether if people live or die, we are surely sweating as if it did!
However, I am super excited to share with you guys the new features going into production! Before you read, notice how some of these went into production thanks to the feedback from our valued clients. As a small business, we truly take your feedback and cover it into action, because you are the real boss here.
”We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how
we improve.
Bill Gates Microsoft
Many people reached out asking “bro, can I try it before I buy?” and at time of release it was not possible. However, now it is! We are opening the gates for you non-adcentral-believer to try AdCentral for 7 days before you have to pull the trigger! We are allowing one store per account to create a trial. If you are a multi-store owner, you will have the chance to try for one of your stores before you decide to get them for all!
Another great feedback was “man, I wish my logo was more noticeable”. We took that to heart and our team quickly got to work to make this happen. Now you will see your logo on a white background with a purple ring so your clients can see the personalization right away!
To support vertical oriented screens, our team spent hundreds of hours trying to find the best way we could deliver this experience to you. Our product team wanted to make sure, clients who had vertical oriented screens, could experience our app in vertical orientation the same way clients experience our app in horizontal screens. This means, we did not want you to turn your head sideways to navigate our tv app!
As you can imagine, our developer team was not very excited about that. Different to a smartphone experience, TV devices operating systems such as Apple TV OS is not built to support an accelerometer change as if you were to flip your phone from a horizontal to vertical position. That makes sense, since people usually do not flip their screens vertically on a regular basis.
As far as videos, well… all of them had to be remade due to having to shift screens spaces to deliver a good experience. We would not want to play the video using only half of your screen and display a top and bottom blank space! This also means, every single future video needs to be made twice. One for horizontal TVs, and one for vertical TVs. I told you AdCentral was fun!
At release time, we had several people ask if Apple TV was the only platform we would support.While our team had been working hard on various platforms, we wanted to make sure everything went as smooth as possible. Our team had to make the hard decision to wait on the release of other platforms to make sure we could control a smooth experience to early adopters. However, we are now live onAndroid TV and and Apple TV! Please read specs on supported devices.
Finally, for this release, we are going live in other countries where English is not the primary language. While support for more countries will be ramping up in the up coming months, Mexico is the first non-English country supported by AdCentral. We figured with enough clients in Mexico, we could import some decent tacos and guac.
Thank you so much for being an AdCentral client, remember to reach out if you have any questions, ideas, or you just want to say hi!
