Newspapers/Portals

People are continuously looking for websites to explore their city, find out where they want to go before they leave, and any news pertaining to their city. Portals have started to catch on over the past 2-3 years, and have evolved into vast knowledge centres that, in some cases, rival phone books. Competing for audience share (users) is becoming more competitive as more city specific portals are beginning to appear. Brand Technologies has come up with an inexpensive way to defeat these issues, BrandBar. BrandBar designs customized toolbars for portals that increase brand recognition, user base, revenue from page-view advertising, as well as create another revenue stream (see Internet Search and Scrolling-text Advertising below).

Portal Branding- The logo and name of the portal will appear every time a toolbar user opens a new browser window to use the Internet. The average household surfs the Internet for 32 hours per month (Nielsen NetRatings, January 2003). This means that your portal’s brand will be exposed to any toolbar user for a minimum of 32 hours per month. In addition to the brand exposure, the logo will have a dropdown menu that will have links sending the user to the portal’s homepage, and give them information about the toolbar.

Scrolling Text Advertisement- Scrolling Text in the toolbar allows the company to send a message/advertisement to users that is clickable (sends the user to a target website). The text can be changed to allow promotion of different products/messages, giving companies the ability to change the advertisement on a daily basis.

Custom Buttons- BrandBar provides the client with 3-4 dropdown buttons on the toolbar. Each button is capable of having up to 120 customizable links (400 total) that can be changed by the client at any time through an easy-to-use client centre that is accessible via the Internet. The changes will automatically update on every user’s toolbar within 24 hours. This makes it very easy for the client to push any new products/services, or inform users on anything happening in the company.

Pop-up Blocker- Are you tired of those annoying pop-up ads that waste your time and make you want to pull your hair out? If so, BrandBar is the perfect solution. BrandBar provides all of its users with the ability to block over 99% of all pop-up ads. This allows for easier navigation on the Internet. BrandBar provides users with the ability to enable/disable their pop-up blocker at the click if a button, putting the user in charge of what appears on their computer screen.

Internet Search- BrandBar provides its clients with an Internet search box. This allows users to search the Internet using Google ^TM from any website. This feature prevents users from having to type in the address to a search engine each time they want to search for something on the Internet. Search is now always immediately available from the browser.

Site Search- This is an optional feature for BrandBar clients. If the client already has site search capabilities, BrandBar will incorporate the existing site search into the toolbar. This does not incur any additional costs for the client. The only task that the client needs to do is provide BrandBar with the technical information needed to connect to the search
service, and we can facilitate the integration of the parameters into the toolbar.