The Magazine Format and the Dog-Ear

Promovolve serves exactly one kind of ad: an expandable magazine. The format is not a stylistic preference — half the system’s design depends on it.

Collapsed and expanded

In the page, the creative — the ad artifact itself, the thing readers see — is collapsed: a cover — image, headline, an advertiser tag — occupying whatever rectangle the publisher provided. Tapped, it expands into a full-screen overlay the reader swipes through like a small magazine: a cover page, a story page, and a call-to-action page. Collapse it and the page is exactly as it was.

The three-page narrative is fixed by design. It gives the LLM copywriter a stable dramatic structure (hook, substance, ask), gives the designer a stable layout target, and gives readers a consistent gesture vocabulary. The renderer is a self-contained script that mounts the creative inside Shadow DOM, so publisher CSS cannot leak in and the ad cannot leak out.

The event vocabulary follows the format. Opening the magazine fires the click — in this format a click is the expand, a reader choosing to spend attention rather than to leave the page. Tapping any page of the spread navigates to the landing page (the CTA event). And a fold is the dog-ear gesture below — bookmarking the ad — which is the strongest signal of all: serve-time selection learns from clicks and folds, with folds weighted double.

Folds cost the advertiser nothing. There is no cost-per-fold billing anywhere in the system — a bookmark volunteered by the reader is not a billable event.

Fluid, not fixed-size

A creative is a layout, not a bitmap. The same creative renders into a wide leaderboard strip, a boxy rectangle, or a tall half-page rail — the shapes ad slots traditionally come in; the renderer reads the slot’s geometry at mount time and reflows — container queries, not server-side variants. Publishers offer whatever slot shapes suit their design; advertisers maintain one creative instead of a matrix of sizes. This is what lets a pilates studio with no design staff participate at all.

The dog-ear

The corner of every folded creative can itself be folded down — a dog-ear, the gesture readers already use on paper. A dog-eared ad is a bookmark:

• It lives in the reader’s browser. The pin is stored in IndexedDB, keyed by slot, and presented back to the server with each ad request. The server signs fold state into a stateless token; it never stores who bookmarked what, because it never knows who anyone is.
• It wins the slot. At serve time, a valid pin bypasses the auction, scoring, pacing, and budget entirely: the bookmarked creative simply serves. On pages where the pinned slot doesn’t exist, the pinned advertiser is excluded from the normal auction site-wide — the system must never burn a reader’s saved ad as an ordinary impression, and must never chase the reader with the same advertiser’s other creatives.
• It is free and unlearned. Pinned re-encounters are counted in their own dogeared_* counters and excluded from spend, from CTR learning, and from every optimization loop. A bookmark is the reader’s choice; the moment the system monetizes or learns from it, it stops being one.
• It heals itself. If the advertiser leaves the site, the campaign ends, or the creative is revoked, the serve response tells the client which pins are stale, and the client deletes them from IndexedDB. A transient lookup failure never deletes a pin — only a confirmed “this creative is gone” does.

One consequence surprises people operating the system: if you dog-ear an ad on your own site while testing, that advertiser stops appearing in normal rotation for you. The system is working as designed — your browser asked it to.