Mary CollinsNow that Chrome’s long talked about auto-pausing of Flash ads has begun, (since September 1st), we really are noticing clients taking HTML5 more seriously than ever. Due to our expertise in HTML5 banner ads, we’ve been very busy over the last couple of months on some high end HTML5 campaigns. From a full HTML5 takeover experience, to a single suite of 160 rich media banners I’ve personally begun to talk about banners in my sleep!
Display advertising is always fast-paced with tight deadlines, but with the volume of banners we’re delivering to our clients at the moment, I needed to start thinking about how I could improve the process, and critically for our clients, speed up the process.
One thing that has always been a bit if an unknown is the DoubleClick QA process. DoubleClick provide a Quality Analysis (QA) service for rich media banners which we’ve happily been using for years. All rich media banners run through Google’s DoubleClick platform need to go through a stringent QA process by a QA certified authority. The drawback of this is that you must allow 24-48 hours for the QA process to be completed, and if for any reason the banners fail QA or a change is made after they have gone through, the QA process will need to be restarted.
Needless to say this can sometimes cause a delay of days, which just doesn’t fly in cases where we’ve been given very short turn around times. With Flash banners, the QA process was more straightforward, in that Flash is a self contained entity and isn’t affected by different browsers and browser versions as HTML5 is. So QA for a HTML5 banner will take much longer than for an equivalent Flash creative.
And so we come to my latest DoubleClick certification badge, the QA Certification Badge. This simply means that we are now in a position to QA our own banners. We of course follow the same strict QA processes that DoubleClick do, but we can manage the process ourselves if requested, and can save hours if not days in getting a creative from design to the media agency. A bonus for everybody.
The advantages really came into play recently when a client requested a small text change to a suite of banners, and we were able to make the change and push through QA within a couple of hours as opposed to a couple of days if we were relying on third party QA.
We pride ourselves on the quality and speed of our display advertising delivery, and with this new certification, we’re taking that offering to a whole new level. Please feel free to get in touch if you’d like to see how we can deliver your display advertising more effectively than ever.
With a background in design, Mary has morphed into one of our lead developers here at Friday, developing expertise in display advertising and motion graphics along the way. Basically - there's nothing she won't get stuck into given the chance.
Jamie Geoghegan
Dave Jackson