DoubleClick, Macromedia Premiere Motif With Multi-Event Tracking

Advertising technology provider DoubleClick Inc. and Web development toolmaker Macromedia today rolled out the second phase of the DART Motif rich media solution, which lets advertisers and marketers create, traffic, deploy and report on rich media ads.

According to DoubleClick’s most recent Ad Serving Trend Report, 37 percent of all ads served on its system are rich media.

The companies jointly launched the platform in July, integrating Macromedia Flash with the DART ad management solutions. The companies said that the toolset could reduce the time for creating and deploying rich media ads from two weeks to one to three days. IT supports all major formats, including in-page, floating and floating with reminder.

“The idea is to take out the need for an independent third-party rich media vendor, allowing publishers and agencies to work with a single solution that saves time and money,” said Doug Knopper, vice president and general manager, online advertising solutions, DoubleClick.

The expanded version released today now includes Audience Interaction Metrics, a reporting and analytics capability that helps marketers understand and track how users interact with the adds. Multi-event reporting lets marketers measure more than 30 interactions, such as ad exposure time, time spent interacting with the ad, multiple clicks, loaded movies and whether a rich media ad fully delivered. Custom tracking events can easily be included by ad designers, according to the companies.

A new interface for centralized reporting, DART for Advertisers ReportCentral, allows comparisons between different rich media campaigns and between rich and non-rich media campaigns. It also allows users to run scheduled reports.

Knopper said the new platform offers three benefits: Creatives don’t have to worry about technology for tagging ads or creating reporting mechanisms. “There’s literally a button that says, ‘Make this a DART ad,'” he said. Live preview capability lets the creator see how the ad would look on the page and make changes on the fly. Finally, all performance metrics can be input to the DART interface. “You can get a real feel for how the viewer actually interacted with the ad and where they went,” he said.

The multi-event reporting capability will help marketers measure the branding effects of their campaigns, Knopper said. “When you look at effectiveness measures, rich media has a significantly higher branding effectiveness measures, especially on favorability and purchase intent,” he said. Most significantly, according to Knopper, is the post-impression effect, where an ad was viewed but the user didn’t take immediate action. The enhanced DART Motif interaction metrics will let marketers understand that effect. Knopper said rich media garners a response level that’s about 50 percent higher than conventional online media and three times higher on actual dollar conversion.

Thus far, no independent researcher has correlated interaction with rich media advertisements with better branding effects or increased propensity to purchase, but DoubleClick is not alone in beginning to offer such metrics, seeming to presume that such a correlation exists.

DoubleClick and Macromedia said that they had lots of customers for DART Motif, including Ford Motor Media, MPG Media Contacts, OgilvyInteractive UK, Tribal DDB-Dallas, Universal McCann Interactive and Zentropy Partners. Publishers employing the tool include CBS Inc., Cox Newspapers, MIT Technology Review and MTV Networks.