Lose Weight: Tips For Trimmer, Slimmer Rich Media Ads

      Another weight-related headline! Dont worry, this one will not involve smoothies, workouts, or pills. As we approach the holidays and you think about your exciting seasonal interactive rich media ads, weight is something to considerwhen running rich media ads on mobile devices, that is. Imagine you are on a plane. This plane is carrying cargo. Your cargo is your set of creatives. And you are going to drop these creatives on eager consumers who are waiting for your holiday surprise. But you have to be aware of wind, speed, and fuel limitations. In addition, you dont want to crush your consumers with huge loads! You want to connect with them and have them and interact with your rich media creatives. So what do you do? You lighten your cargo. The plane will run faster and the package will be delivered more smoothly. What are the benefits of lighter ads? The ads weight has a major impact on its loading time. For the ad to run, it must have a conduit that serves the ads information into the smartphone. This means either going through your customers data network or Wi-Fi. Not all smartphones are created equally and not all data plans are priced equally. In the US, bandwidth is not as much of an issue with super sized data plans and the prevalence of Wi-Fi. But saving weight is especially important other regions. In EMEA, with higher data prices, serving lighter ads is essential. In APAC, the rise of 3G and 4G, along with lower data plan costs have allowed for more engagement and rich media consumption. But we still have a distance to cover and prices are still steeper than they are in the US. Regardless of the price of access, lighter weight ads run more quickly and are therefore much more desirable to both the advertiser and consumer. Imagine looking up at the sky, waiting for the package to drop, but it keeps getting slowed down and stalled. Your neck gets tired, your eyes get tired, and you get distracted by a squirrel. So you, the advertiser, just dropped that box of rich media creatives down for no reason. What a waste. Generally, ads should not weigh more than 300K in the US, and 200K in other markets. Some rising, and very creative economies like China, are struggling with rich media because of bandwidth. Creating light-weight, rich media ads that run quickly and smoothly on multiple devices is not always easybut you have multiple options if you use InMobi Studio to build your ad. How to create lighter ads with InMobi Studio? Lighter Text: With InMobi Studios Text tool, you can write text in your ad as you create it, then save the text as an image. This saves you weight as the ad will be served with a static image embedded within your ad. So no text will have to be rendered at the time the ad is served. If you do need to use text, perhaps to allow for dynamic text within your ad, using Device Fonts will help. This means the ad uses the devices existing fonts without having to fetch any specific fonts from a server. There is also double-byte character support for international clients, running ads in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and more. Location: Adding geographic context to your ad by inserting a store locator, or any geo information, is a valuable addition to any creative. Context and geo-personalization speak volumes to the relevance of the ad, and can therefore increase interaction. However, using maps can be heavy. Instead, you can use geo-location. With geo-location, you have all the benefits of a map without actually displaying one and without weighing your ad down. This way, you are just allowing the loading of a small bit of code that gives latitude and longitudinal info. Image Compression: Images can add a lot of weight to a creative. InMobi Studio contains an image compression engine that allows quick compression of images to JPED, PNG-8, and PNG-24 formats. You can easily compare the original image with the compressed image with a double-pane view that shows the images side by side. In addition to Compression, InMobi Studio shows a Weight Report for every part of your creative. There you can see the list of images and assets with associated weights and click into them to compress on the fly. As you can see, InMobi Studio allows for creativity, not just in your ad creative design, but in how it is served and received. Our builder is more sophisticated than other builders, allowing more programmer-style designing. So you have to get to know it a little bit before you jump in and create award-winning ads. With InMobi Studio, you can think outside the template, and outside the spelled-out buttons in the User Interface. We give you programming tools, that rather than looking like lines of code, are commands you can access with drop down menus and a little bit of know-how. We hope you weigh your options carefully.