Last week, we talked about how XAPP Ads were developed to ensure consumer scalability. That boiled down to making the user experience so simple that consumers could successfully interact with an ad the first time. From an advertiser standpoint, we wanted to deliver a similar outcome. Radio ads today are simple and inexpensive to make. XAPP Ads are too. There is no new programming platform for agencies to learn, XAPP Ads are created just like traditional radio ads.
Same Format as Traditional Radio Ad Creative
Radio ads are simple to build. You write copy, get voice talent to do the voice over, conduct a little post-production, and you are done. We support this very simplicity with XAPP Ads. The only difference in the creative is that the ad script will include the intended action or engagement phrase prompt at the end. For example, instead of repeating an 800 number three times, you simply add the phrase, “after the beep, just say call now.” That’s it.
I recently saw that Adtile is creating a marketplace for interactive mobile ads. Adtile’s main product is Motion Ads that allow users to interact with ads by moving, shaking or doing something else with their mobile device. It’s designed to be more interactive than touch actions and take advantage of the device’s embedded accelerometers. The challenge, as with other rich media, is that they require software developers to code the ad features that leverage the Adtile motion interactions. Thus, they needed to create a marketplace to make it easier for developers to create the ads. With XAPP Ads, no developers are needed. Your existing radio ad partners can do this today.
Point-and-Click Interface
Once the ad is created, the publisher ad ops team typically takes over. However, configuring the XAPP Ad is easy enough for anyone to do it. The audio file is uploaded to XAPP’s cloud hosted server through a point-and-click interface. From there, a couple of additional clicks indicate the XAPP Ad format and the ad can be ready to run in a matter of minutes.
We recognized that advertisers often need quick turnaround time. The creative is sometimes approved at the last minute or campaign requirements change. Radio has always been great, in part, because you don’t need much lead time to get a new ad on the air. XAPP Ads deliver that same speed while delivering new dimensions of interactivity and creativity.
Creative Variety
The final point is enabling creative variety. Advertisers will tinker with new ad formats, but will only stick with those that provide value and variety. The value of XAPP Ads is immediately obvious. They provide a simple way to create higher conversion rates from mobile audio consumers. Creatively XAPP Ads also provide a number of new opportunities for advertisers.
First, advertisers are no longer constrained to traditional 15, 30 and 60 second ad formats. XAPP Engagement Ad formats have expansion capabilities. After a short 10-20 second teaser, interested consumers can choose to hear more. If they engage with the ad by saying the prompted phrase, the expansion segment can be of any length. These can also be followed by action phrases that lead to conversion.
This brings us to the second area of creative variety. Whether it is after the initial ad audio or following the expansion content, XAPP Ads provide marketers with a variety of conversion actions to complete the consumer engagement. In some instances the creative team may want to guide consumers to watch a video, in others initiate a call or app download, still others may want to send an email, open up a website or a page with a product already in a shopping cart. Different campaigns may be optimized around specific actions or include multiple conversion types. The creative palette is broader than traditional radio advertising.
Ease of Use is Critical to Scalability
You can see that XAPP put a lot of time into thinking about ease of use for both consumers and advertisers. Ultimately, we believe this makes the system more scalable where humans and other processes interact with the mobile ad serving process. Our next installment will get into the more traditional areas of technical scalability – integration and the ability to serve large numbers of ads. If you have any questions about how we designed XAPP Ads to be scalable for advertisers, feel free to reach out anytime to info@xappmedia.com.
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