Sprout technology solves the complexity of mobile rich media planning, creation, distribution, and measurement for brands and agencies globally

AUGUST 2, 2011, 08:00 a.m. PDT: Today, InMobi, the world’s largest independent mobile ad network, announced the acquisition of Sprout, whose HTML5 rich media creative platform helps agencies and brands reduce the complexity of rich media mobile ad creation and distribution. InMobi’s global presence combined with Sprout’s rich media technology will help the mobile advertising industry easily build and distribute engaging rich media ads to consumers everywhere.

Known for simplifying the complex process of HTML5 rich media mobile ad creation and distribution, Sprout’s vision is to help advertisers “build once and deliver everywhere” on both mobile and desktop devices. Sprout’s cloud-based platform brings efficiency and scale to organizations creating mobile ads and its rich media creatives are compatible with mobile devices supporting HTML5, including Apple iOS and Google Android devices. Sprout works with some of the world’s leading brands, including Chevrolet, Disney, Paramount Pictures, HTC, Sega and Nokia.

Naveen Tewari, CEO of InMobi, comments: “Sprout’s technology solves a critical need for the industry by helping bring engaging mobile ad experiences to consumers all around the globe. The acquisition fits perfectly with our vision to enable the mobile ecosystem with best of breed technology and services. The entire industry will benefit from the combination of our technology and operational footprint on five continents and Sprout’s platform.”

Commenting on the acquisition, Ajit Nazre, Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, says: “The mobile industry is struggling to fully capitalize on the engaging advertising experiences now possible through smart devices. This acquisition will help scale the use of rich media advertising globally – a critical next step in helping the industry realize its full potential.”

Sprout will operate as a fully independent company working with the entire mobile advertising industry to solve the HTML5 creation and delivery problem, and will continue to expand its product in the coming months by adding workflow enhancements, analytics, and innovative new ad units.

Carnet Williams, CEO and co-founder of Sprout, comments: “InMobi’s commitment to an open and independent Sprout made them the clear choice for us. We will continue to work with all existing partners, including competitive ad networks, globally.”

About InMobi

InMobi is the world’s largest independent mobile advertising network. With offices on five continents, it provides advertisers, publishers and developers with a uniquely global solution for advertising. Its network is growing fast and now delivers the unprecedented ability to reach 314 million consumers, in over 165 countries, through more than 36.2 billion mobile ad impressions monthly. InMobi was recently included in both the 2011 AlwaysOn Global 250 and the 2011 AlwaysOn OnMobile 100 Top Private Companies lists.

InMobi is venture-backed with marquee investors including: Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures. The company has offices in San Francisco, London, Bangalore, Tokyo, Nairobi, and Singapore.

To learn more, please visit www.InMobi.com, follow us on Twitter @InMobi, or read our blog atwww.InMobi.com/InMobiblog/.

About Sprout

Sprout is the leading platform for creating mobile HTML5 rich media advertising. Its team has been market leaders for social media and mobile technologies for the past five years, and was one of the first preferred Facebook Developers. Sprout has a simple philosophy: Creative professionals should be able to build once and deliver everywhere. Its platform creates HTML5 ads that are compatible with leading mobile ad networks, aggregators, and publishers.

Sprout is venture-backed by Polaris Venture Partners and has offices in Honolulu and San Francisco.

To learn more, please visit www.sproutinc.com and follow us on Twitter @sprout.

Please contact Dan Gamble, for further information or for a briefing with a senior spokesperson.

Tel: +1 415 598 8902

Email: dan@If-communications.com

Remember widgets? Well, they’re still around, they’re just far more interactive. Sprout, the company that launched an impressive widget builder two years ago, is diving deeper into advertising, as it shifts its products to better suit today’s market. This has all led up to Sprout integrating with DoubleClick, adding the ability to serve ads as well as help you create them.

Perhaps you’ve noticed the change in advertising methods, moving from display ads to app ads. This has occurred primarily in the mobile market, as apps from particular brands can act as methods of advertising themselves. The web overall is becoming more fluid and interactive, meaning ads need to keep up.

Read the entire article on SiliconAngle

by Anthony Ha

San Francisco-based Sprout made a big splash when it launched two years ago with its easy tools for building applications in the Flash format. In the last few months, it has been refocusing on advertising, and with today’s just-announced integration with Google’s DoubleClick ad products, Marketing Director Roland Smart said the company has completed “the major parts of this pivot.”

The company’s first big announcement in this area came in April, when it revealed that its tools could be used to build interactive ads that run in both the Flash and HTML5 formats (an Alice in Wonderland ad built with Sprout is pictured above), depending on what the viewer’s Web browser supports. Now, Sprout is also helping with the distribution of those ads — it allows users to import ads into DoubleClick Studio, where the ads can be previewed, then pushed out to DoubleClick’s ad servers.

Read the entire article on VentureBeat

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

Inside the social media echo-chamber, the pressure to bring brands onto Facebook is intense. Amid the rush, many brands lose sight of why they’re going there in the first place, when they should have a clear focus on how they’ll deliver ongoing value to their community on the platform. These are still early days, as big brands that can afford to invest heavily on the platform are still experimenting and learning. And, it’s important to note that not all brands belong on Facebook. In this article, I’ll discuss a handful of unlikely brands that have invested in the platform in order to highlight some questions you should be asking yourself to determine if Facebook makes sense for your brand. Hopefully some of the examples will also inspire you.

Read the entire article on iMedia Connection

April 16th, 2010

Last week during Apple’s iPhone 4.0 Preview, Steve Jobs announced iAd, a product that could help turn the mobile ad industry on its head. The new product lets developers quickly integrate rich, HTML5 ads into their applications — ads that Jobs says will meld the emotion of television commercials with the interactivity of online advertising. There’s just one problem — many of the rich ads you see online are built in Flash, which the iPhone and iPad famously do not support, and Apple doesn’t appear to be offering tools for building HTML5 ads. Sprout, a startup that’s long dealt with rich Flash applications, may have the answer: its ‘Engage Ads’ platform allows advertisers to build rich ads and simultaneously deploy them in both Flash and HTML5.

Read the full article here.

Solution allows advertisers to create ads once and simultaneously export Flash and

HTML5 ads that can be served on multiple platforms

San Francisco, CA – Today Sprout, the leading software as a service technology platform for creating rich, engaging ads and social media applications, announced that the Sprout Engage Ad Platform, a visual authoring solution, can now export both Flash and HTML5 ads.  Sprout is currently signing up beta partners interested in streamlining their workflow and scaling production of mobile ads for networks such as Apple’s iAd service.

“Steve Jobs’ announcement of the iAd platform and his goal of 1 billion impressions a day will challenge advertisers to scale their HTML5 production” said Carnet Williams, Founder and CEO of Sprout. “Apple is not providing a development platform, and advertisers’ current tools do not export HTML5, so Sprout is providing a solution that is scalable, offers a single workflow, and does not require hand coding.”

The platform 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.

“The Sprout platform is a visual authoring solution that does not require writing any hand code, it protects publishers from malvertising problems. Since code cannot be introduced, Apple can now focus their ad review process on ad content rather than the ad code” said Matthew McNeely, VP of Engineering at Sprout.

Brands, agencies and publishers interested in the HTML5 Beta Program may apply through the Sprout website: sproutinc.com/html5beta.

At Sprout we’re thrilled to start the process of identifying partners to participate in our beta-program. We believe this will make our Engage Ad Platform event more attractive to advertisers, publishers and agencies that are looking to scale production of rich, interactive, and socially connected ads that can be served in both Flash and HTML5.

Carnet Williams is CEO and Co-Founder of Sprout, a brand engagement ad platform.

AdExchanger.com: Let’s start with the name – how does “Sprout” mesh with what you’re doing today? And, what problem is Sprout solving and how does this play out with your announcement about Disney?

CW: The display advertising business is still incredibly young. There is so much room for innovation to sprout. We want to make display ads relevant and engaging. We want to enable brands to plant relationships with customers and nurture those relationships with continuous conversations over time.

Today, we announced Sprout Engage Ads. Sprout Engage Ads allow brands to make stronger connections with their audiences by providing a fun, interactive experience, wherever their audiences travel online.

Our first customer to roll out these ads is Disney, who created Engage Ads for Alice in Wonderland. These ads are designed to take display advertising to the next level by bringing personally relevant data right into a standard Flash ad unit. The ads are ‘smart’ in that they know when you have engaged with them so you will never see the same content twice. In addition, the ad and the Facebook application is linked so the ads know if you have engaged with the app and vice versa. For example, if you add yourself to the Mad Hatter’s Army in the ad, when you come to the Facebook app you will be recognized as being in the army.

Read the entire article.

Sprout, a San Francisco-based startup that has worked on Facebook apps for Disney before, has come up with a Web-ad version of their Alice in Wonderland app. The ad, which teases fans to upload photos of themselves, is interactive, and remembers if you’ve personalized it already.

Read the entire article.

La Costa, CA – February 23, 2010 – At the IAB Leadership Conference, Sprout, the leading technology platform for creating rich, engaging ads and social media applications, announced the Sprout Engage Platform. This platform is designed to take display advertising to the next level by bringing personally relevant data right into a standard Flash ad unit. Sprout Engage Ads allow brands to make stronger connections with their audiences by providing a fun, interactive experience, wherever their audiences travel online.

“The landscape for how brands market to consumers on the Web has changed over the last couple of years,” said Carnet Williams, Founder and CEO of Sprout. “Broadcasting messages is quickly being replaced by two?way conversations and branded experiences on social networks. We think the future of online advertising is bringing application?like engagement and interactivity into the standard display ad unit. We know brands and customers will benefit when ads contain personally relevant content, be it a Twitter feed, a friend’s endorsement, social data, or an engaging Flash experience,” Williams added.

“Brands have been coming to Sprout for rich, engaging social applications and Fan Pages,” said Adam Taisch, VP of Business Development. “Now, for the first time, brands have an end?to?end solution that extends the conversations beyond the walls of Facebook to any site that runs display ads. The result is a consistent user experience across social networks, brands’ Web sites and display ads,” Taisch added.

Disney will be running Sprout Engage Ads on IGN, Fandango, Movietickets, YouTube, and Addicting Games to support the March 5 release of “ALICE IN WONDERLAND.” “’ALICE’ is a rich, immersive film that’s on the cutting edge,” said David Singh, executive vice president of worldwide marketing for Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. “It’s important for us to give our audience an innovative first?to?market experience every time they come across our film. Sprout Engage Ads will provide that experience through our online display ads.”

Jones Soda is another brand adopting Sprout Engage Ads. “On the Jones Soda web site, we allow our customers to personalize their soda labels,” said Mike Spear, Marketing Director at Jones Soda. “We think this personalization drives brand loyalty and sales. We love the idea that customers can have that same interactive experience wherever they encounter our display ads on the web. I think this will drive increased soda sales.”

Brands interested in running Sprout Engage Ads and publishers interested in offering Sprout Engage Ads can email info@sproutinc.com

About Sprout:
Sprout gives you a better way to connect people with your brand through personally relevant Engage Ads and Engage Apps across all the leading social
networks and publisher sites. Sprout Engage Ads give your brand better ad performance than traditional rich media ads. Sprout customers include Disney, Warner Bros., Intel, Toyota and MTV. Funded by Polaris Venture Partners, Sprout is based in Honolulu, HI and San Francisco, CA. To learn more, please visit http://sproutinc.com.