The Big Day

29 Apr 2011 - Tom Limongello

We've been waiting for this moment at Crisp for a long time. Mobile advertising has long been recognized as having the greatest global potential for delivering reach and scale for brands. It was not, however, until recently that we at Crisp started noticing something great. Big, full-screen Crisp ads that had always been in English started showing up in Chinese on our test iPads here in our Midtown HQ in NYC.

Yesterday's post in TechCrunch about Crisp’s new round of funding, led by a new investor, EDBI of Singapore, was a great reminder to us all that Crisp is ready to help its publishers bring great brand experiences to a lot more iPhone, iPad and Android devices around the world, starting right now.

Crisp, together with the other ORMMA.org pioneers, is working together closely with IAB and MMA working groups on bringing the necessary standardization initiatives and best practices to the attention of agencies, ad tech companies and publishers.

That means that as more publisher and ad network ad servers become compliant with some key standards (like IAB’s MRAID), brands will be able to run ads like they do in desktop advertising, without friction and with an even wider geographic distribution than ever before -- especially since the iOS and Android platforms are growing globally much faster than any other platforms ever have. Starting now, the model of competition in mobile advertising is about what it should be, creating the most dynamic advertising possible.

Stay tuned for news about Crisp Engage next week. Crisp Engage is launching its Charter Program, and we are calling on creative agencies who’d like to show off their HTML5 skills, or play with some of the templates we’ve been building over the past two years to create brand experiences for mobile apps and browsers.

And BTW, for those of you making the trip to Singapore next week, meet Boris Fridman and Xavier Facon in Singapore at the Mobile Marketing Association’s MMF Forum on the 3rd through 5th of May!

Popular Mechanics iPad App Launches with Interactive, Full Screen Ads Powered by Crisp Wireless

13 Jul 2010 - Tamara Gruber

The Popular Mechanics iPad application launched recently featuring full screen rich media ads for Infiniti, Stanley-Bostitch, History Channel’s Ice Road Truckers, Trane, and TakeMeFishing.org.  These campaigns include full screen interstitial ads, served between content pages of the Popular Mechanics iPad app. The Crisp-powered rich media creative features multiple interactive hot spots to click for further product details and includes embedded videos that can play in full-screen view. 

 
Watch an example of the Stanley-Bostitch ad for the Anti-Vibe hammer:

Crisp Wireless ad for Stanley in Popular Mechanics iPad app from Crisp Wireless on Vimeo.

 The Crisp Mobile Ad Platform enables publishers and agencies to easily create, serve, manage, track and measure mobile rich media advertising campaigns. The platform includes an extensive catalog of rich media formats, mobile ad serving with third party tracking support for publisher-side ad servers, and detailed engagement reporting to track impressions, interactions, conversion events and video play rates and completions. With the launch of these campaigns, Crisp has added iPad support to allow true cross-platform delivery across devices, sites, and apps, making it easier for agencies to utilize creative across a wide variety of devices and content.
 
Learn more about the Popular Mechanics iPad app:

Swiper no Swiping! A Response to the ClickZ Review of Wired's iPad App Advertising

1 Jun 2010 - Tom Limongello

ClickZ to my knowledge is the first site to dedicate a 10 minute video (see below) to reviewing mobile ads. The fact that they reviewed only the Wired iPad app advertising in itself is worth noting in terms of how important the iPad is to advertisers and publishers. Since the video is long I’ll boil it down for you, they were unhappy with the lack of interactivity, and since there were so many ads in the app, and because print ads are not by nature interactive, it was probably really difficult for Wired’s sales team to do much. We’ve been a part of the process of digitizing print ads for iPad apps over the past two months and we thought it would be great to do a deeper dive into what’s in the Wired App and offer some perspective, pointers and thoughts on how advertisers could do better.

Whoa There.
It’s not easy to change creative without creative direction and it’s not easy to make an ad digitally rich unless you’re given the right assets--but, it’s not impossible. Although the ClickZ review was all about the negatives, I would give HBO, eTrade, and Lea & Perrins points for their creative use of gallery buttons. Ads like Lea & Perrins full page ad with hotspots make a flat print ad into something highly interactive. Also, leveraging learnings from mobile content delivery, we’ve been proponents of galleries because it takes big sets of content and makes it bite sized. If you play with the Lea & Perrins ad you are getting 12 recipes – however they are laid out with 12 buttons, and this much more fun to tap through than a list, especially because the text changes quickly using CSS + JavaScript transitions.
 
Swiper no Swiping!
Content is King, and what we’ve learned at Crisp is that as we work with App developers who leverage the Swipe feature, is that we cannot count on using swipe as a gesture within advertising. If mobile devices are about vertical scrolling, the iPad is about horizontal swiping. As Swiper the Fox might say to Dora the Explorer "You'll never find it now! Ha, ha, ha!!"
 
Note: we’ve also learned that swiping content does not load as fast as tapping for content, because Apple’s gestural technology is not smart enough to start loading at the beginning of a swipe, so quick taps onto a navigation arrow will actually perform the request to either the local file or to a server faster in every case.
 
Follow the Arrows
Intel and HBO got dings for not offering readers a clue to find the rest of their ads. Without adding navigation buttons on the creative it would be nearly impossible for users to know that there were three panels for each of these ads. Why is that? Well because the Wired iPad app uses horizontal scrolling, they decided to offer vertical scrolling to show the rest of the ad content. Other than us reviewers of ads, will anyone else ever change their behavior to see ad content?
 
Danger Zone
Samsung only offered a full screen in portrait, which looks bad in landscape. You have a choice here, offering a cube-sized creative in the safe zone, anything smaller than 660x660, would have saved Samsung.  In the absence of the right sized creative you need to offer something different in landscape than you do in portrait. Even if it doesn’t fit the screen perfectly, it’s better to make it look like you are doing it on purpose rather than just have the wrong sized ad swirl down the whitespace well when you turn your iPad to landscape. 
 
The punchline also got lost in the rotation on the Heineken ad. Heineken gets points for having a call to action for rotation, and offering ‘can I touch’ in portrait and ‘yes you can’ in landscape. However, you cannot touch anything in the ad. Hmmf.
 
Link-in, not Link Out
Most advertisers with embedded links didn’t use webview, so they left the app to show a microsite rather than render the landing page in the app. Use the webview.
 
What do you get the advertiser that has nothing? ClickZ offered a wake up call to Tissot who did not even put their website link in the ad, but clearly leveraged ‘connectivity’ in the ad copy, so it looked like they were paying lip service to interactivity. 
 
No Tracking, no Interactivity
Giving agencies the benefit of the doubt, they may have said, ‘Why do I want to offer cool features if I can’t track them?’ Does your iPad app have an SDK that can handle rich media interactions and offer dynamic reporting? We suggest using our HTML5 open web standards approach because it can leverage the same rich media as you serve on mobile web, iPad safari and even on your desktop site. 
 
The takeaway for me is that mobile advertising is now getting the spotlight, and the size of the creative is now full page, which is bigger than any digital creative we’ve ever seen before. There’s a bigger opportunity and a bigger margin for error.

 
 
 
[Title inspired by Dora the Explorer's Fox nemesis named Swiper (credit for the reference, Nathan Carver)]