Sprout: Blog

Sprout Launches New Ad Format With Adobe

Roland Smart — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 17:53:58 +0000

Sprout is happy to announce that we’re part of a select group of partners who are working with Adobe to launch two new mobile ad formats. The formats are for full screen presentations on smart phones that support Adobe Flash Player 10.1 software and/or HTML5; you can read more about the launch on the Adobe Labs page here.

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.

Sprout Event in LA Next Tuesday, Oct. 19th

Roland Smart — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 20:53:54 +0000

This coming Tuesday, we’ll be opening our LA office for an event with the LA chapter of the AIGA. We hope you’ll come by to share a cocktail and catch a presentation of case studies that will explore user-centered design for the current digital landscape. We’ll touch on everything from why having more Facebook fans isn’t always the best goal, to how to maximize your earned media by using cross-channel advertising, to how to design iAds-like units outside of the iAds network.

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

Sprout at IAB MIXX

Roland Smart — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 01:03:04 +0000

Sprout is looking forward to participating in the IAB MIXX conference in New York next week and we’d enjoy getting together if you’re at the show. We’re also in the running for an IAB MIXX award for our Alice In Wonderland campaign which is exciting.

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

Sprout and DoubleClick Studio Are Now Integrated!

Roland Smart — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:00:51 +0000

Today we’re happy to announce that our platform has been integrated with DoubleClick Studio, the rich media production and workflow tool. The integration makes it easy to develop ads with Sprout and then use DoubleClick Studio to manage workflow and submit creatives to DoubleClick’s ad serving products DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) and DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). You can read the full press release here.

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HTML5 Ad Building Demo

Roland Smart — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 17:49:57 +0000

Since launching our HTML5 Beta program, we’ve been cranking out HTML5 ad units and improving the functionality of our ad creation software. Today we’re going to share a video that highlights how the combined creation workflow has been a big time saver for our clients. In this following presentation we’ll share the step by step process of building a demo ad unit simultaneously in HTML5 and Flash. (more…)

From Photoshop to HTML5 Ads With Sprout

Roland Smart — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 17:48:53 +0000

It’s now possible to streamline your workflow even more with Sprout by importing your creative right from Photoshop into our ad creation software. The process involves our new FXG converter which can be downloaded from within our platform. Here’s the new workflow:

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

Sprout wins sfBIG award: Next BIG Digital Startup/Technology Company

Ruud — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:36:19 +0000

We’re happy to announce that Sprout won the sfBIG award for ‘Next BIG Digital Startup/Technology Company’ at the ‘BIG Star Awards’ in San Francisco last week. It’s a real honor to stand side by side with the giants of the Bay Area advertising industry, especially considering we’re relatively new to the industry. We’ve come a long way in three years and look forward to being an ongoing part of the sfBIG community!

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Share Your Experience: Facebook Fanpage Best Practices

Ruud — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:37:23 +0000

There’s a lot of change afoot on Facebook specifically around how to manage fan pages and there’s some conflicting information out there as well. We’d like to help you stay up to date on the real best practices, so, we’re working on a guide that will share what we’ve learned after producing hundreds of fan pages. We hope the it will be a great resource for you and want to make it as thorough as possible. For this reason, we’d be thrilled to hear what you’ve learned so we can roll that into the content as well.

What’s working for you? What can you share about publishing from your page? How your pages work together? Something about custom tabs? Have you been A/B testing using Facebook’s publishing tools? Does interactive content perform better for you in the stream? Feel free to share your insights in the comments of this post, or just shoot us a note at marketing@sproutinc.com. If we use something from your comments, you’ll be credited in the guide! (more…)

Why Highly Interactive Display Advertising Spend Is About To Jump

Ruud — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:39:25 +0000

We know that the spend on online advertising has been going up fairly consistently over the last 8 years (see table 1), but the rate of growth has been suppressed by the US economic turndown which began in early 2008. Of all the online display spend, the amount allocated to highly interactive units experienced a disproportionate amount of the downward pressure because of a hesitancy to experiment in a down market. However, we project that as the economy recovers, a disproportionately large amount of dollars will flood back into this segment. This is because of the incredible innovation that has taken place in online display during the downturn.
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Showcasing: The Latest Campaigns

Ruud — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:16:06 +0000

Sprout is excited to announce some new and amazing campaigns that have been build with the Sprout Platform. Check it out:

Toyota’s Rock The Space
Turn up the volume, because Rock The Space is back! After a highly successful campaign in 2009, Toyota and MySpace decided to bring this contest back. Rock The Space is an application that gives all MySpace bands the opportunity to customize their own demo-tape and upload their song to compete for an exclusive MySpace Music recording contract. Like last year, there’s some pretty good stuff out there, click here to go to the app. (more…)