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Yesterday I took another wander through the web and found a short article named “understanding Scrum” at the pm-blog.com. Dr. Stefan Hagen has linked a really good presentation named The Zen of Scrum by Jurgen Appelo which is available on Slideshare.net. This presentation is a really good start to get an idea of Scrum. Some of you may heard about it, some may not.

Scrum is an iterative, incremental methodology for project management often seen in agile software development.

Although Scrum was intended for management of software development projects, it can be used to run software maintenance teams, or as a general project/program management approach.
Source: Wikipedia

By clicking through the presentation I was remembering my first contact with Scrum. So I decided to write this little blog entry.

Before I’ve started at AdScale I read a lot of stuff about Scrum and agile project management methods, but I was always caught in the typical “waterfall” process. Unfortunately I’d never had the chance to set up any working agile processes as employee in my former company. Advice: Everyone should be committed to break the mould of old behaviors. I would say there was no ill will intended but we’ve never made it to implement a new methodology to get our software development projects done.

That changed in February 2008 when I have started to work at AdScale. From the CTO, my colleague and shining example Manfred Friedrich, I heard that there was a scrum process basically established but – same story – it was more or less ignored by the business team. No offense guys! Haha! I’m just talking about the old times. Now everyone at AdScale is committed to our agile project processes even though some people might wish there would be another approach of getting the things done.

First I might have to explain the constellation we have since the beginning at AdScale. There is the headquarter in Munich, Germany, which is running the whole business (product owner) and the AdScale Labs, our development team (scrum masters and the teams), is located in ChristChurch, so that is far, far away on an island named “The South Island” of New Zealand. Distance between the teams: more than 18.500 km and a time difference between 10 and 12 hours. Yeah. Sounds weird? It is. Hilarious. How this constellation was born is a complete other story.

If you are familiar with the Scrum methodology you may now thinking about the common stuff like daily scrum meetings, task boards and what ever. Forget it. Over such a distance there is no way to stick the teams closely enough together, but… you can try. We tried it and we found a way – over the years – to establish our agile processes which serves its purpose. I would lie if I say that the process is “finalized” yet, because from time to time it is mandatory to review the whole process and initiate some slight modifications. All in all it works really good for us and often an outstanding person is wondering how we manage it to get the things done (so fast)… given that the teams are so far away from each other.

Actually we are working with two product owners (product developer) in Munich and two scrum masters and four teams, including the “product team”, the “adserver team”, the “database team” and the “quality assurance team”, in ChristChurch. Meanwhile we are able to deploy every two to three weeks a feature/improvement set which is boosting and increasing our business or helps our customers to use the AdScale platform for their personal goals. The remarkable speed and the quality is based on every single team member. Within two years we managed it to built germany’s biggest marketplace for online advertising and I’m proud to be a part of the team which made it happen.

If you are interested in the way we work and what its all about, than please let me know. Maybe there are some suggestions you could use for your business. Maybe there are some interesting stories how you achieve to work with your teams located in different countries and time zones. Let me know by a comment. Thanks.

Since August 2008 AdScale is officially measured by comScore. Every month we have renewed the actual comScore numbers on the AdScale website. If you put the historical data in a graph the development of AdScale looks really awesome. I’m sure this will be not the limit. If I’ve some time within the next days I’ll write a short recap of the year 2010 that is about to draw to a close. You can be sure that we’ll have some really nice things on the development roadmap for 2011, but I’ll don’t give anything away for now!

At October 2010 AdScale hit the first time a reach of more than 70% of the german internet users. We are pretty sure that in November 2010 we achieve again a all-time-high.

In October 2010 more than 38 million unique user have seen an advertisement which was delivered through the AdScale marketplace.

In August 2009 we hit our all-time-high regarding the supplied page impressions where advertisement were delivered through the AdScale marketplace. You may have recognized the little drop in September and October 2010. This has traditional to do with the general growth of online advertisement in this period. The experience shows that in the last quarter of the year the publisher websites do much more sell their own inventory directly to the advertisers, which reduces the available inventory in the marketplace but increases the max.bids for a campaign and the coverage of a available ad slot.

Some days ago AdScale has officially announced a new, eye-catching advert type on AdScale: the Video Interstitial Ad. The interstitial ad is a form of banner advertising, which is requested before or in between a Webpage is loaded. Even before the actual landing page appears, the interstitial ad is shown as one of the largest ad formats which covers the browser window completely.

Since not need to be placed on a website or specially must be adapted to it, the interstitial ad show itselve to the user unparalleled and exclusive, like the so-called commercial breaks on TV. Therewith the advertiser is able to carry his emotional advertising message, up to a maximum length of 30 seconds, to a huge additional audience which is accessable via the AdScale marketplace. With the interstitial ad we are supplementing our portfolio to one of the most popular and fastest growing formats in the online advertising and enable the rapid development of net coverage and the optimization of contact classes. A general website frequency capping controls the frequency of how often an Interstitial Ad will be shown to a user across all websites within the marketplace. By this so-called contact class optimization a high level of interest for the brand communication is given, without the user feel disturbed by too frequent displaying of a video advertising. The process also allows an accurate controlling of the campaigns net reach.

The video interstitial ad, we now have included in our portfolio for advertisers and for publishers, is a very attractive and high quality advertising format. At least – its another step in the right direction. There are surely some things we can and we want improve. So… stay tuned.

The new and official comScore figures are available and – again – AdScale grows. In August 2009 the german online marketplace was measured by comScore with more than 5 billion page impressions (+22%, July 2009: 4.1 billion) and impressive 26 million unique visitors (+12%, July 2009: 23.2 million). This number of visitors is equivalent to more than 60% (+5,3%, July 2009: 54,8%) of the german internet users.

That’s really, really fantastic! Thanks to all out there which are using our marketplace. We’re really working hard to improve the system and the web client to satisfy your needs and increasing your business, equal if your a advertiser or a publisher. So stay tuned for the next enhancements.

AdScale was measured by comScore in July with 4,1 billion page impressions a month. We reach round about 23,2 million unique visitors and cover therewith more than 54,8% of the german Internet users. For me the numbers were just amazing and I totally freaked out. Why? It’s summer and as far as my experience goes the traffic isn’t normally growing in this season. From day to day we now scratch the 250 million page impression per day marker. It’s really impressive. The traffic and reach is still growing. I’m looking forward for the numbers of the august measurement which should be available at the end of september.

Till then there are several things to do. Also it is the dawning of the dmexco 2009 – digital marketing exposition & conference – in cologne. Anyone of you is going to visit the dmexco too?

If someone wants to meet me there personally please fill out this form or contact me via XING / LinkedIn. As AdScale we’ve a booth there at A048 / Hall 8. See ‘ya there!