{"id":855,"date":"2010-05-26T23:42:04","date_gmt":"2010-05-27T06:42:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rustinjessen.com\/?p=855"},"modified":"2010-05-26T23:42:04","modified_gmt":"2010-05-27T06:42:04","slug":"the-story-of-maingate-ads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rustinjessen.com\/wordpress\/the-story-of-maingate-ads\/","title":{"rendered":"The Story of Maingate Ads"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the first projects I devoted time to after leaving Disney, almost a year ago, was to finally finish and release my Magic In Type – Castle letterpress poster<\/a>. It was a project I had started many months earlier, but I could never devote enough time to get it to the finish line. I was very excited to finally be able to work during real daytime hours and make it happen.<\/p>\n

Skip forward a few weeks to when I had a crate full of freshly pressed prints on the floor of my studio, and it was time to let the world know about it. I, of course, had this dream that I would post one tweet<\/a> about my posters and the world would be completely amazed by what I had done. Word would spread like wildfire and I would sell out in mere minutes. I did tweet about it, and posted on facebook, and I had a reasonably good response to that… but reality was setting in that I would need to dig a little deeper to make it work.<\/p>\n

I decided I would do a little online advertising in the niche areas that might be interested. Disney fans & typography geeks don’t really run in the same circles, so I focused on the area I was most familiar… Disney Parks fan sites.<\/p>\n

To make a long story just the tiniest bit longer, I found that advertising on the sites I frequented most was a complete mess. There is a myriad of sites that were possibilities, but they were all covered with boring, vaguely-targeted text ads or flashy, noisy, annoying animation ads, and in most cases, both<\/strong>. It all felt like somebody was handing out a box full of megaphones and telling everyone to stand in the same room and yell their message. With everybody trying to scream the loudest, everyone gets lost in the noise.<\/p>\n

It was around this same time I read an interview<\/a> with a business hero of mine named Jim Coudal. In the interview Jim talks about being frustrated with the state of online advertising in a specific demographic where he wanted to market a new product. He got annoyed and did what any self respecting entrepreneur would do. He decided he could do it better, and with that he launched The Deck<\/a>.<\/p>\n

His story just hit home with me at the right time. I started forming plans to fix what I think is broken about advertising on the sites I love.<\/p>\n

After several months of planning and working out the technical details, I’m very happy to announce the launch of the latest J. Blackbird<\/a> venture… <\/p>\n

Maingate Ads<\/a> – A new ad network reaching out to theme park fans, travelers, memorabilia hounds and amusement industry buffs.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beginning July 1, 2010 we’ll be serving simple, beautiful and perfectly targeted ads on an impressive lineup of websites. We’ve been so fortunate that our message has struck a chord with website publishers and advertisers alike. We’ll start reasonably small, but we’ve already got some big plans for the road ahead.<\/p>\n

If you run or know of a website that’s interested in carrying Maingate Ads, or if you’d like to find out about purchasing ad space, drop us a line<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the first projects I devoted time to after leaving Disney, almost a year ago, was to finally finish and release my Magic In Type – Castle letterpress poster. It was a project I had started many months earlier, but I could never devote enough time to get it to the finish line. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[66,16,64,27,65],"class_list":["post-855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-posts","tag-advertising","tag-design","tag-launch","tag-magic-in-type","tag-maingate","entry","has-post-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rustinjessen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rustinjessen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rustinjessen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rustinjessen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rustinjessen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=855"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"http:\/\/rustinjessen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":876,"href":"http:\/\/rustinjessen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855\/revisions\/876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rustinjessen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rustinjessen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rustinjessen.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}