By Sean Bruce, Studio Manager, LMO Advertising
Changes in the digital ad space can be scary for marketers … and the businesses they serve. But sometimes, change is a good thing and can help enhance marketing efforts.
Recently, Google Chrome – the world’s most popular browser – stopped running ads that use Adobe Flash. For digital advertisers (and all advertisers today need to be digital advertisers), this could have caused quite a conundrum. Why? Because clients pay advertising agencies billions of dollars annually to make sure their ads run properly online. If the ads go down, we go down.
Everything in advertising is fast paced. Trends and technology are constantly evolving – keeping our industry on its toes. For instance, in the past few years we have seen great change in how we market our clients in the mobile space and across social platforms.
Keeping the consumer engaged has always been the key to successful advertising, but now, we must create a loop from engaging the customer on social platforms and through other content marketing efforts to taking them to the end game. With constant changes in the digital ad space, such as Google’s recent decision regarding Flash, achieving this has become an increasingly complex process.
Luckily, my team at LMO Advertising (the largest ad agency in Washington, D.C., and a Capitol Communicator sponsor) and I saw Google’s decision to stop running ads from Flash coming years ago. We were tipped off to Flash’s inevitable demise during a Steve Jobs speech in 2010. He read an open letter to Adobe and criticized its vulnerabilities – and then blocked it from all iOS devices. Therefore, even five years ago, using Flash had its drawbacks – and smart marketers prepared for a world without Flash.
Given how popular iPhones and iPads were (and still are), the fact that Flash ads would never work in iOS was a huge issue. That’s when I knew we had to change our strategy and switch from Flash.
Now, we use HTML5, a language that accommodates responsive design, allowing ads to run across multiple devices.
What benefits does the switch from Flash hold for businesses? HTML5 saves time and money and improves data collection, particularly when it comes to mobile. Data collection from mobile devices is an integral aspect of what marketers need, as more users are using mobile devices over desktops today. HTML5 is especially helpful in that coding can be built-in to an ad to track a user’s geolocation, helping marketers target people more effectively.
The first client we migrated to HTML5 was Advantage Rent a Car – and our results were phenomenal. In addition to a streamlined campaign that ran smoothly across all devices, by using HTML5 we collected great data (both mobile and desktop) on our target audiences for our client. Data like this helps us optimize our ads and who we are marketing to which ensures our clients reach the right audience, when the message will make the most impact so their return on investment makes a difference to their bottom line.
In business, it’s all about the bottom line. And HTML5 allows businesses to take their ad campaigns to the next level and reach more people—on mobile and beyond.
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