According to Yipit, there are 1,300 group buying deals offered every day in North America. That’s down from its peak, but still a lot of deals from the 350+ daily deals sites that Yipit tracks in the US. Now imagine how many deals are offered globally each day. How does a participant in this market with a limited marketing budget get noticed?
One answer is to use real-time advertising to promote current deals and drive qualified traffic to your website. By showing specific offers in your online advertising rather than a generic message, you are (1) promoting the offer at the earliest stage, (2) qualifying the audience, and (3) driving a higher quality ‘click’ to your website. If you go the next step and navigate that click directly to a dynamic landing page that features the precise deal clicked upon, you are making it very easy for a purchaser to convert. No surprise then, that real-time advertising for daily deals generates a much higher conversion rate and hence ROI on ad spending than traditional display advertising.
Now combine that with the ability to detect and switch language on the fly. Suddenly you have a very powerful and effective advertising tool that requires no maintenance, yet is always up to date.
Here’s an example – written in HTML/JavaScript, it runs on mobile devices as well as desktops.
Available now, only from Immedium. Drop us a line to learn more.
Google has been quietly upgrading Swiffy since my original post on July 1st. This online, easy-to-use tool for converting Adobe Flash SWF animations into HTML5/JavaScript files has undergone three new releases which fix bugs but also extend the utility significantly. Swiffy now supports shape tweening, drop shadow, blur and glow filters for browsers with SVG support, ANSI and Shift JS encoding, _global variables, SWF 6 function definitions, Bevel and Adjust Color filters, MovieClip.onLoad event, and initial support for ActionScript 2 inheritance.
As I said before, if you expect Swiffy to take recently coded Flash content and convert it to JavaScript, you’ll probably be disappointed. It still won’t handle most ActionScript 2 functions, let alone ActionScript 3. But if you regard this as a mechanism for creating new JavaScript tweened animations via the tried and tested features of Flash and its WYSIWYG timeline, you can save a lot of time.
On 29 June 2011, Google Labs announced Swiffy, a Google-hosted conversion utility that aims to convert Flash SWF files to HTML5/JavaScript files, allowing you to reuse Flash-developed content on devices without a Flash Player (such as the iPad). It’s a tough assignment that others have attempted without enormous success. How well does it work?
In its favour, it’s about as easy to use as could be. Nothing to install – just upload a SWF from your computer and get almost instant conversion with visual verification, plus listings of any problems or unsupported elements. Unfortunately, there are just too many unsupported features to make this a useful utility for most of the files we tried.
Firstly, Google Swiffy only supports ads developed in ActionScript 2.0, and a subset of SWF8 functionality. That rules out all ActionScript 3 developments, and indeed most recent Flash developments, since they will likely be targeting Flash Players 9, 10, or later. Google suggests that you export your Flash animation as a SWF5 file which gives some idea of how much of a SWF8 subset they are actually supporting. SWF5 is actually based on ActionScript 1.0 – that’s going back a long way!
Although Swiffy is quite good at mimicking animation, it falls down badly on script conversion and replication. Typically it shows an error of the type: “An unsupported ActionScript instruction was encountered.” There’s nowhere to go after that. But even if your ad contains no demanding ActionScript, it likely uses features like masks, shadows, stroke modulation and filters which are also problematic for Swiffy.
If you attempt to use Swiffy to convert your existing SWFs, you’re likely to be disappointed. But this is missing the point. What Google has done here is to create a free and very usable tool for Flash developers to overcome the barriers to mobile deployment of their works. Think of this as a mechanism to facilitate new development, not for reusing old assets. Yes, we have to wind the clocks back to August 2000, when Flash Player 5 was released along with the initial version of ActionScript, and we have to confine ourselves to a very limited set of features. But as the Swiffy Gallery shows, we can still do a lot with a little. Flash developers now have a tool for developing animated content along a visual timeline that they are very familiar with, and which will deliver very acceptable fallback content for devices that don’t support the Flash Player. And it can only get better.
Banner ads haven’t garnered much good press in the last few years. Whereas search-based advertising has been growing year on year, and other forms of online marketing have attracted a better ROI, banners have gathered a reputation for attracting few clicks and largely being ignored by Internet users. But there are some exciting innovations in banner ad technology that promise to change this perception and generate strong returns for those with the vision to see beyond the banner as nothing more than a branding tool.
One of these innovations is the ability to promote and sell a product directly from the ad itself. And by sell, we mean execute the transaction without the need to drive the buyer to your web site. We call this ‘direct-purchase advertising’. How is it done? Quite simply, with a payment gateway such as PayPal. It’s been possible for some years now to build an ad that features one or more products with picture, description and price, and includes a ‘Buy Now’ button that posts the purchase details directly to PayPal for completion of the sale. Despite the lack of good documentation in the PayPal Developer’s Guide for JavaScript programmers, the interface is straightforward, and it’s possible to integrate Google Analytics into the process to track and capture transactions. But ads of this type are rarely seen on the web, and it’s unlikely that this is because of the technical complexity.
Above is an example of such an ad created for Treasured Memories Inc., the Illinois-based suppliers of fine keepsake jewelry, featuring five of their beautiful designs in sterling silver. Developed in HTML and JavaScript, it runs across most platforms including the iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry Torch, and other mobile devices. When you think about it, a banner ad is an ideal mechanism for promoting and selling a single ‘hot’ product like a newly released gadget, an eagerly awaited album, or a new book from a well-known author. There’s no need to navigate through layers of menus, the product is clearly and visually displayed right there along with its price, and there’s nothing to cause the shopper to hesitate. One click and you’re whisked into PayPal or perhaps Google CheckOut to safely make payment without exposing your credit card. How much easier could online shopping be?
So why aren’t advertisers falling over themselves to use this powerful marketing tool? It could be that enough of them simply aren’t aware of the possibility. Let’s hope this article helps to get the word out. But another reason is that they haven’t felt it worthwhile to commission such an ad for a single product that might be in trend for a week or two and then fall back into the noise.
Here’s where recent innovation can help. Using ‘live banner‘ technology makes this ad editable, yielding some very significant benefits:
The product price immediately becomes updatable, allowing the ad to be developed before the price is set, and the price to be changed if necessary during the promotion. It also allows for advertisers to include marketing tricks such as a price discount if a shopper can give the right answer to a question posed inside the ad.
The ad becomes reusable, so that it can easily be repurposed for a different product offering at any time, even to promote a product that didn’t exist at the time the ad was built or distributed. Variable content in the form of words and pictures are easily uploaded later and activated when required.
If your live banner has the ability to detect the user’s location, it can programmatically switch product or currency accordingly, obtaining the price either from another variable element, or by computing the conversion on the fly from readily available live foreign exchange rates.
Now we have a banner that has an unlimited life time yet is always current, a clear and highly measurable goal, and the ability to generate direct revenues for as long as it operates. Oh, and with universal relevance. And it plays on desktops and mobile devices. Isn’t that the holy grail of advertising? Available now from Immedium.
Wouldn’t it be nice, we thought, if we could not only deliver live banners to mobile devices, but we could also make them sense their environment and allow users to interact with them using either a mouse or a finger? The ergonomics are quite different – whereas on the desktop we can position a cursor with pixel accuracy and click on a tiny button, on a mobile we’re typically touching the screen with the index finger, which is quite a blunt instrument.
To cut a long story short – now we can. Here’s an example of a rectangular banner that will play across desktop browsers from IE7 to Chrome, Firefox and Safari as well as iPads, iPhones, and iPods, and display its content either by mouseclick or lateral ‘swipe’.
This example shows a brief gallery of images of the gorgeous Audi R8. Other applications might show property for sale, this week’s supermarket specials, or trailers from the movies showing at your local cinema. Remember, these are not just animated banners, they are live banners, meaning the content stays editable throughout its lifetime. So not only can we deliver interesting ads to mobile users that operate as they would expect, we can keep them fresh and relevant.
Real-time advertising on the iPad and its cousins has never been so tangible.
It’s always been possible to build banner ads with a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But until recently very few did, because Adobe made it so easy to put together simple animations along a timeline with Flash, and managed to get the player onto the world’s browser base as a must-have plugin. Why would you want to make life harder than it needs to be?
But the world has changed thanks to Apple’s enormous success in selling beautifully designed and constructed mobile devices that apparently do everything you might want, except run the Flash player. And the iPad is really the catalyst for developers to take note and move on. Why would you want to give its users, who rank amongst the world’s most upwardly mobile consumers, anything less than the best and most compelling advertising message? These are people with high disposable incomes who expect and demand the richest online experience, and yet they are being served ads in the form of static JPEGs and GIFs – fallback options for the audience that has no Flash Player installed.
It’s time for advertisers to stop treating iPad users as second rate citizens and ensure that the web pages they see are populated with ads that are as innovative as their slim and shiny devices. And how better to do this than with Immedium?
Yes, you guessed it. The banner above was handcrafted using JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, and loaded into Immedium whereupon it became editable, thus creating a real-time banner that will play on the iPad/iPhone as well as it plays on any desktop. Its appearance is guaranteed to be the same across desktop and mobile devices too, thanks to its use of a webfont loaded into the ad at runtime. And interestingly, we don’t need HTML5 for this – any old HTML will do. It’s not yet as easy to develop animated content in JavaScript as it is in Flash, but tools are getting better and things are changing quite quickly.
Real-time advertising – now on mobile AND desktop devices, with a single HTML/JavaScript creative. From Immedium.
The recent announcement from DoubleClick Rich Media regarding support for HTML5 banners in DoubleClick Studio is a key step in the migration of advertisers towards the use of HTML5 and Javascript for banner ad development. It’s not that HTML5 offers anything particularly advanced or easy for developers to use – in fact the task of developing animated banners in Javascript is cumbersome and quite limited in scope compared to the rich functionality provided by Adobe Flash. But advertisers simply can’t ignore the rapidly increasing population of mobile devices from Apple that refuse to accommodate the Flash Player: iPads, iPods, and iPhones. With high disposable incomes, their owners are prime targets for advertising, and the iPad in particular is a superb medium for delivering advertising content, with ample screen real estate, high definition, and bright colors.
Meanwhile, Adobe has shown an early prototype of Wallaby, a tool for producing HTML5-compatible code from Flash source. Not yet released, it’s a double-edged sword for Adobe: on the one hand, it will be greatly appreciated by the existing Flash developer population as a way to migrate their skills and assets into the brave new world of HTML5, and could even become the de-facto industry standard for animated content development, but on the other hand it accelerates the demise of the SWF, the Flash object code that requires the Flash Player plugin in order to run in the browser.
The humble and often unappreciated SWF cleverly and efficiently embeds every asset required by an ad into a convenient little package that is easily distributed and served in a single file structure. It can hold any combination of text, images, graphics, individual glyphs, fonts, audio, video, and programming instructions. We don’t yet have the same concept for delivering banners in an HTML5 environment, where ads have the same needs for multimedia assets, but also typically require access to one or more Javascript libraries that accelerate development time. That results in multiple files and scripts that need to be reliably referenced, stored, and served in order to display a single impression.
MWeb, the open media file format especially designed for the web and supported by Google, Mozilla, Adobe, Opera et al, based upon the Matroska open source container, might have offered a suitable vehicle to replace the SWF for advertising applications. But a .mweb file is narrowly defined to comprise only VP8 video and Vorbis audio streams – no images, graphics, fonts or scripts. What a missed opportunity to make HTML5 ad delivery as simple as sending a SWF.
An ad that updates every second? Yes, that’s exactly what we have here, and with good reason, as a timepiece is useless unless it’s accurate. In possibly the most sublime real-time ad ever, Immedium partners with Swiss watchmaker Les Cubeurs to produce a mesmerizing banner that uses a powerful combination of connectivity, subtle animation and gorgeous photography to deliver its message in your local time.
For more information on Les Cubeurs stylish range of designer watches, visit www.lescubeurs.com.
“Display ads are big. They’re gonna be huge.” Google has ambitious plans to streamline the targeting, purchasing, and measurement of display advertising (commonly known as banner ads) across all delivery platforms. If they have even a small fraction of the success they’ve had with AdWords and text-only ads, the banner ad won’t fade away, as some have predicted. It’ll be transformed into the most accessible, effective, innovative, and measurable form of advertising available. And that should be good news for advertisers, publishers, and consumers.
We’ve all encountered web sites from multinational organizations that detect your location and automatically start serving you content in the language of that country, completely ignoring the fact that a large percentage of web users are business executives or travellers on vacation, visiting cities and resorts where they don’t necessarily speak the native tongue.
Even those very clever geeks at Google get this one wrong. If you type www.google.com in your browser while vacationing in Phuket, for instance, you’ll be automatically redirected to www.google.co.th with menus in Thai, regardless of whether you’re from Bangkok, Boston, or Beijing. You’d think that they would know as well as anybody that location and language are increasingly unrelated in today’s globalized world. And there’s really no excuse for making this mistake.
The header that is transmitted with every Internet request carries the definition of the sender’s IP address that web servers use to determine your location. But it also includes several fields describing the user’s environment, including browser type and browser language settings. One of these defines the user’s primary language – the one he or she has chosen when setting up preferences in the browser or operating system. This is a much more reliable indicator of language preference than a user’s current location.
Intelligent ads can make use of this feature by sensing the language code at runtime, and using it to switch content accordingly, on the fly. It’s probably not realistic to cater for every language under the sun in every ad, but if you’re running an online campaign across a geographic region where multiple languages are commonly spoken, this can really improve effectiveness and hence performance. For instance in California and some other US states it would be smart to support Spanish and English language options. In Canada you’d certainly want to deliver both English and French. In Switzerland, add German and Italian. In Japan, China, and Korea, the addition of English language copy would help reach visitors and foreign workers.
The ad at the top of this page is a live banner example that illustrates the technique. This banner, developed using the Immedium platform, is able to sense both your location and your primary language and respond accordingly. Currently it is programmed to display its message in English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Japanese, Simplified & Traditional Chinese, Korean, and Thai. It contains embedded fonts, an animated logo and a background image, yet still has a file size under 50kB!
To summarize, a single creative developed with the help of Immedium can deliver your advertising message in any one of sixteen or more languages – the one each individual viewer prefers, irrespective of geographic location. That not only brings you closer to your market, it boosts your return on advertising expenditure. What’s not to like?
