The Advertorial Tool is Sunset Digital’s own marketplace platform, which the agency presents as Germany’s first advertorial marketplace. It connects advertisers with publishers for link building and advertorial content and runs at app.sunset-digital.com. Advertisers browse and book placements, publishers receive briefings and deliver, and the agency follows every booking from order to invoice.
Project scope
A new application, started in September 2025, now in production and still in active development. I lead the development in a team of two, covering architecture, back end, front end and deployment.
Responsibilities
- Designed the application on Laravel 12 with a React and TypeScript front end connected through Inertia.js
- Built the marketplace of advertorial and backlink offers, with categories, tags, link types, filters and saved table preferences per user
- Implemented the cart, orders and payments, including VAT calculation
- Built the booking workflow with separate statuses for the customer, the content and the publisher, and briefing emails sent to publishers
- Built content writing and review, with a rich text editor, editor feedback and publishing steps
- Integrated the OpenAI API to generate headlines and rewrite advertorial text, with prompts that administrators edit in the application
- Integrated the SE Ranking API for traffic, visibility and site health audits per domain, run as background jobs that respect the API’s rate limits
- Added accounting views for customer and publisher invoices
- Implemented roles and permissions, an activity log, translatable content and an interface in more than one language
- Set up automated tests, static analysis and a GitLab pipeline that tests and deploys the application
Outcomes & results
Instead of every customer working through hundreds of publishers’ media kits, the agency analyses the publishers’ offers, standardises the information and makes it comparable in one system. The booking process, from an advertiser’s order to the publisher’s delivery and the invoices on both sides, runs in the same application. AI assistance shortens the writing of headlines and advertorial copy, while editors keep the final review.
Key accomplishments
- Delivered an AI-assisted content feature in production, with prompts kept outside the code so the agency can tune them without a release
- Built background processing for SEO metrics that handles API rate limits and retries without manual intervention
- Kept the code base covered by 70 automated test classes, with static analysis and error reporting through Sentry
- Maintained a continuous release rhythm with test and deploy stages in GitLab CI/CD
Skills gained
- LLM API integration in production features
- Marketplace and booking workflow design
- Rate-limited background processing with queues
- Inertia.js with React and TypeScript on Laravel
- Type-safe routing between back end and front end
- Leading development in a small team