Until recently, mobile video ads have mostly been pretty boring. That’s because, frankly, they’re difficult to make and scale across all the different devices that brands, agencies and marketers want to serve them in. So instead, they serve up boring old display ads, or maybe pre-rolls, against mobile video.
Ad network Tremor Video is hoping to change all that, with the release of a new platform that will make it easier for agencies to create and serve up more interactive mobile video ads. With Tremor’s Mobile Creative Platform, agencies can avoid the problem of device fragmentation.
While online ads have pretty much standardized on Adobe Flash, there are multiple operating systems, manufacturers, processors and form factors to worry about. So there’s no real one-size-fits-all solution. That is, until now.
The Mobile Creative Platform came about in part due to Tremor’s acquisition of Transpera last year. Transpera had developed a platform for automatically recognizing the form factor of various mobile devices, and then customizing websites and video players to suit them. And hey, if you think device fragmentation is bad now, just thinking about how many thousands of different feature phones Transpera had to work with before iOS and Android took over.
Tremor is using that technology now to help marketers create ads that can play on any mobile device. Creative teams can now build ads without having to worry about the particular intricacies of one mobile operating system or another, or how different devices might have different versions of the same OS (*cough* Android *cough*) Instead, they create ads with a WYSIWYG-type editor and let the Tremor platform do the heavy lifting of formatting and delivering the correct ad for whichever device.
The platform is only available to Tremor customers, but the startup is considering opening it up and making the tool available for use with other ad networks and ad management platforms. Until then, it’ll count its mobile platform as a key differentiator in the fast-growing mobile video market.