Sprout is happy to be working side by side with Adobe, EyeWonder, Greystripe, Medialets, MediaMind, and PointRoll on this ad format launch. We’re also the only ad creation platform in the lot so we’re thrilled about that as well. We’ve created three ad units for the launch which you can see here.

Our units are built in HTML5 using AdVine and include a unit for Nike that features our pananle image component. The video below showcases how the ad unit was built in 45 minutes, a fraction of the time it would take to build it using Flash Pro.

This mixer will include chances to brainstorm around your own design challenges and needs with AdVine super-users. It’s also chance to get an up-close and personal look under the hood of Sprout’s platform and our AdVine ad creation software. And we’ll have some great cocktails on hand from Silverlake Wines.

Register for the event here!

Where: The Sprout offices are located at: 1551 S Robertson Blvd Ste F Los Angeles, CA 90035 (northwest corner of Robertson and Pickford, 3 Blocks south of Pico)
When: Tuesday, October 19, 2010 from 6:00 PM – 9:00

Here’s a short video that shows off some of the latest features we’ll be sharing:

San Francisco, CA – June ##, 2010 – Today, Sprout, the leading technology platform for creating rich, engaging ads and social media applications, announced that the Sprout Engage Platform, a visual authoring solution, has been integrated with DoubleClick Studio, a rich media production and workflow tool. The integration makes it easy for creative teams to develop ads in Sprout’s visual authoring studio and then use DoubleClick Studio to manage their workflow and submit creatives to DoubleClick’s ad serving products DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) and DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP).

“With the February launch of Sprout Engage Ads we showed brands how they can bring the interactivity of a Facebook application into a standard IAB display ad,” said Carnet Williams, Founder and CEO of Sprout. “Today, we are ensuring that these ads can be quickly created and easily brought into the DoubleClick platform for trafficking and measurement.

Now, ads created using Sprout Engage can be uploaded to DoubleClick Studio. The integration allows ad properties, such as rich media events, to be setup during ad creation and carry over to DoubleClick Studio, where the Sprout Engage Ads can be previewed, tested and pushed to DFA or DFP. This ensures the ads can be served by DFA/DFP, which provides clients with accurate measurement metrics wherever the ads are run across the web.

Sprout Engage supports expandables, 3rd party APIs and social data integration with the leading social networks. It also includes a rich set of analytics to measure performance and optimize for success.

“Sprout Engage Ads have dramatically changed the way we look at what we can do in an ad unit,” said Matthew Wessel, Flash developer at ThinkGeek.com who was in the program beta. “Integrating RSS feeds into an ad unit used to be time consuming and difficult. Using Sprout Engage Ad Builder we were able to visually create a fully functioning ad unit in just minutes. And integration with DoubleClick means that we can measure the performance of the creative, which we need.” Wessel added.

About Sprout:

Sprout gives brands a better way to connect with consumers through next generation display ads and engagement applications. Our Engage Platform empowers advertisers and publishers to rapidly deploy rich, interactive, and social brand experiences that encourage consumer engagement. Fully integrated with the leading ad servers and social networks, Sprout campaigns can run anywhere your consumers spend time online. Sprout customers include Disney, Warner Bros., HBO, Federated Media, Intel, Technorati, Toyota, and MTV. Funded by Polaris Venture Partners, Sprout is based in San Francisco and has offices in Los Angeles and Honolulu. To learn more, visit sproutinc.com

The integration allows ad properties, such as rich media events, to be setup during ad creation and carry over to DoubleClick Studio, where the Sprout Engage Ads can be previewed, tested and pushed to DFA or DFP. This ensures the ads can be served by DFA/DFP, which provides clients with accurate measurement metrics wherever the ads are run across the web. Here’s a demo video that shows the process of completing an ad in Sprout and bringing it into DoubleClick Studio:

At Sprout we’re focused on way to streamline the process of creating ads and this integration is focused on the serving side. If you’re interested in learning more about how you can streamline to process of importing artwork into our platform, check out this post. And if you’re interested in learning about how to build HTML5 and Flash ads in a single workflow, check out this post.

Here’s what Matt Wessel, Flash developer at ThinkGeek.com has to say about working with Sprout as a beta tester of the DoubleClick Integration:

If you’re interested in streamlining your workflow even further, check this post about how our new FXG converter allows you to bring your creative from Photoshop directly into Sprout.

1. Layout your creative in a layered Photoshop file and save in .FXG format
2. Launch Sprout’s FXG Converter Air application and drag the .FXG file onto the converter. This will place a .zip file on your desktop.
3. Open your Sprout account and click on the “import” link, then select the .zip file.
4. Wait for the upload, then open the new project in your project list entitled “imported from FXG”

That’s all there is to it! Here’s a demonstration video that guides you through the import process and takes you through the creation of an HTML5 ad unit. If you’re interested in learning more about the details of building an HTML5 unit you can check out this video in which we walk through the build process step by step.

The findings of this research reveal that hybrid campaigns deliver more value than solely paid or even solely earned social media campaigns. You can read a summary of the report here, and download the full report here. Here’s a summary of how it works in the context of Sprout’s experience.

There are three kinds of media

1. Paid media, consists of paid ad placements that are served alongside a publishers content. Nielsen’s research shows that although these paid ads offer the greatest reach, they have a significantly lower impact than earned media.
2. Earned media, consists of unpaid placements that were generated by users and can sit alongside publishers’ content or user generated content. Although reach is limited by the number of brand advocates, earned media does offer high impact.
3. Hybrid media, what the study refers to as ‘social advocacy’, consists of paid media that integrates earned content. Many of Sprout’s clients leverage our platform to deliver these kinds of units.

Paid Media Meets Earned Media

More fans, better Hybrid Engage Ads
Another interesting finding from the Nielsen study is the fact that having more fans leads to greater impact for hybrid media ads, simply because there are more viewers willing to share the brands’ message in their stream. This fact is illustrated in the graph below that displays the relationship between the percentage of viewers of an ad campaign who are fans of the advertised brand, and the total percentage of in-stream sharing by all viewers as a result of exposure. As you can see, the higher the percentage of fans in the exposed group, the higher the probability that the ad generates earned media. In other words, the effectiveness of hybrid media ads increases when a brand has more fans to target.

This graph also tells us that the extent to which hybrid media ads are more effective than paid media ads depends on the size of a brand’s fan base. From our experience, however, this is not the only factor that will determine the effectiveness of hybrid ads. Other questions to consider include:

• Does your brand have a critical mass of fans to support a hybrid campaign?
• What is the desired reach of your campaign and how relevant is the earned content across the reach of your buy?
• How specific is your campaign target and are they inside/outside social networks like Facebook?
• How does earned media integrate into your creative?

At Sprout we help guide our clients through these kinds of questions to develop a strategy to get the most value from their ad spend. We think we’re uniquely situated to help clients improve the way they integrate paid and earned media because our platform allows us to create ads and apps that work together. For example, our Alice In Wonderland Facebook Connect application that is embedded inside Facebook, and on the movie website, is able to share user generated content with the ad 300 x 250 ad unit for the campaign. We believe that this is the future of the online display industry and look forward to sharing our latest projects here on the blog.

We’re thrilled to share a new case study based on our recent work with Intel. Intel is doing an outstanding job with their social media work on Facebook and we are proud to be part of their effort. For those interested in learning more about how Intel is leading the way, check out a recent panel discussion led by Ekaterina Walter, Social Media Strategist at Intel. The presentation shares some great tips on how to drive fan acquisition on Facebook, which also happens to be a key element of the case study below.

Intel Reaches Out To Their Community On Facebook
Back in October, Intel challenged Sprout to create a new Facebook fan page and application, with the goal of building a significant Intel community on Facebook. Sprout knew Intel had to deliver immediate value, which worked well with Intel’s concept of linking laptop pricing to fan acquisition. The result: the wildly popular “Fan Plan” campaign, which empowered Intel’s Facebook community to incrementally lower the price on three laptops with every new fan added. It reached hundreds of thousands of people and landed Intel over 24,000 new fans—in just two weeks.

The Challenge
Without a pre-existing community on Facebook to get a campaign rolling, Intel needed an integrated approach that included Facebook ads, a fan page, and an application that drove fan acquisition. Sprout’s role was to turn their concept—empowering fans to lower laptop prices—into an application that fully leveraged the viral power of the Facebook platform. Sprout ensured that visitors converted to fans and shared the Fan Plan with their friends through a combination of incentives and viral hooks.

Integrating an Engage App and Fan Page to Drive Virality
The Engage App that Sprout developed for the new Intel fan page was a powerful nexus of social media technologies, desire, and reward. Every time someone became a fan, the app lowered the price on three popular Intel laptop models. Fans were motivated to tell their friends about the Fan Plan in order to further drop prices. The Engage App enabled them to do so easily by letting them place an interactive experience into their friends’ Facebook Activity Streams. Those friends could then join the Fan Plan and share the experience with other friends right from their Stream. A countdown clock provided a sense of urgency and encouraged users to participate before the Cyber Monday deadline, when they could purchase the laptops at the lowest prices.

Delivering Value to the Stream
Sprout belongs to the select group of Facebook Preferred Developers partly because of their expertise in implementing campaigns that maximize relevance and in-stream presence in the face of increasing competition and ever more stringent Facebook relevancy algorithms. Sprout does this by dropping highly interactive content that outperforms simple images or video content right into the stream. Sprout made sure the Fan Plan content drove users to the Intel fan page for the latest laptop pricing because overall fan page traffic increases publish-to-stream relevancy. And because interaction rates in the Activity Stream are much higher than interaction rates in the display ads on the periphery of the page, this approach also helped reduce Intel’s reliance on the supporting ad buy.

The Numbers Say It All: 24,000 Fans in Two Weeks
Intel built a solid Facebook community in record time, and ensured the community’s engagement by delivering immediate value. Over 8% of fans shared the Fan Plan with an average of two to five friends, and 16% of Fan Plan application users purchased a laptop, making this campaign a huge success. Mashable agreed, citing the campaign as “a fan-friendly, brand-conscious initiative that not only actively and passively works to generate buzz around the Facebook Page, but also rewards customers for recruiting their friends.”* For their next campaign, Intel can leverage this existing fan base and rely even less on Facebook ads.

The New Color Picker Component

This new component makes it super easy to place a color picker element into your applications. Before, you could create a color picker with our other tools and components, but by componentizing the palette we’ve saved you the trouble of building one from scratch. And because we’ve included many controls, you can customize it to match your creative. In the example below, we’re using the picker in “spectrum” mode so you see the entire color range–but there are many color sets to choose from between grayscale and full spectrum. You can also show color chips, change the shape of each chip, adjust spacing between chips, add outlines for each chip, and more. Here’s what the color picker looks like in the interface:

We recently used the new color picker in our Rock The Space II campaign for Toyota (which is running on MySpace). And here’s what the color picker looks like inside that application:

RSS Component Enhancements

We’ve also included some improvements to our RSS component, making it easier to format your RSS feeds to match your overall creative. RSS feeds are tricky because it’s often important to adjust image sizes, content format, spacing, and margins–and now you can reformat the RSS feeds with even more controls than before. The upgrades focus on including thumbnails and adjusting margins and spacing. Here’s a short video tour of the enhancements: