According to AOL, a beta of its self-serve ad platform Pictela Enterprise is aimed at empowering advertising agencies a simple, guided interface to manage all their clients’ brand assets and efficiently serve them into premium online display ads. Digitas and Mindshare have signed on as the beta launch partners.
The company noted that Pictela Enterprise will simplify the process of working with online display ads by accelerating the process of uploading, updating and targeting high-definition creative content.
“We are saying all this cool new advertising we do now on AOL, you can now do across the Web,” said Greg Rogers, SVP, premium formats for AOL, and co-founder and CEO Pictela, a division of AOL subsidiary Advertising.com. “Our hope is that by giving people this platform we will be able to start to scale out these ads across the web and to really make advertising more beautiful.”
Pitching into the real-world, Pictela Enterprise is formulated to allow users to upload and design a wide range of ad styles, using assets like photo slideshows, videos, coupons and recipes. Third party impression, click, and engagement tags also supported.
The solution also enables the incorporation of 22 off-the-shelf applications and allows users to customize their own applications. Agencies can choose from among the platform’s six unit sizes–all from the Interactive Advertising Bureau Standard Ad Unit Portfolio including: 300×1050 (Portrait), 300×600, 970×90 (Pushdown), 728×90, 160×600 and 300×250.
“We believe the power of opening our Pictela platform to agencies is the next step in scaling premium formats across the Web,” said Rogers. “We are putting the power of publishing in the hands of the ad agencies and their clients so they can take full advantage of the new larger ad sizes coming to market.”
Also, they can customize the ad’s appearance and specify content to run within the unit. The platform also has reporting tools to show such metrics as the interaction rate, exposure time, interaction time and video completion.
For instance, an agency seeking to run a campaign within the interactive portrait unit–which wraps three interactive modules into one ad-can choose a photo gallery as the first asset, a video as the second and a poll as the third. Besides, if an agency does not wish to opt for the unit’s 22 inbuilt apps, it can create and upload its own app to run within the ad. The agency can set the unit’s coloring to align with their client’s brand coloring. Agencies can also update an ad’s content within the platform and instantly publish the changes, which will be reflected in real time for every instance that the ad appears.
“You can reproduce the client website experience in these ads,” said Rogers, adding that they have seen interaction rates increase five- to six-fold using this platform. “When advertising becomes beautiful and managed in a stylized way, the interaction rate will increase dramatically, and the banner blindness disappears.”
“In North America, we are working with our strategic partners like AOL to leverage and develop technologies like Pictela, to encourage adaptive marketing forward enabling, brands to create engaging brand experiences at scale, speed and with flexibility to adapt,” said Cary Tilds, leader, digital media operations for Mindshare.
According to Robyn Katz Tombacher, SVP, business operations director, Digitas, the Pictela Enterprise solution will enable Digitas to dynamically manage clients’ ad units. “It is the first time that we have been awarded access to make real-time updates without going through a third party,” said Tombacher. “And in today’s marketplace, it is crucial to be able to respond in real-time to what consumers want.”
However, by the end of June the platform will become generally available, giving marketers a way to display ads across AOL properties, inventory sold through AOL’s Advertising.com ad network and a majority of bigger online publishers, Rogers said.
“We feel like display ads have looked a certain way for a long time; it has been driven by direct-response marketing. And we think that in order to attract brand marketers to come online in a really meaningful fashion we need to be able to repeatedly and scalably deliver ads that are beautiful but also illustrate all of that amazing content that they invest in,” Rogers said. He likened the approach to TV ads, which are relatively homogeneous in their formats but differ in content.
In order to further compliment the roll out, AOL also disclosed a partnership with brand intelligence and analytics company Moat-“Moat is becoming a leader in measuring the effectiveness of online brand advertising, and we are excited to offer Moat Brand Analytics through Pictela Enterprise Beta,” Rogers said.