Crisp Media blogs

Happy Holidays! We are giving away an iPad 3 to celebrate

toml — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:34:29 +0000

The team at Crisp would like to wish you a lovely holiday and a very happy New Year! In the spirit of giving, and a love of all things mobile, we are offering you a chance to win an iPad 3! (Yes, we know the iPad 3 isn't out yet, but imagine, you could be one of the first to get it!) To enter, just check out our mobile holiday ad on your smartphone and enter your email for a chance to win.

May your snow this season be as easily wiped away and may all Yetis you encounter be friendly.

Happy Holidays!!

-The Crisp Team

Ad of the Week: Sherlock Holmes 2

caitlin.oconnell — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:03:38 +0000

Crisp has a new entertainment campaign now running on the Yahoo UK mobile website for iPhone and Android phones. The ad begins with an animated banner, and once expanded the panel offers four ways to interact with Sherlock Holmes 2: A Game of Shadows. First, users can swipe to change characters from Holmes (Robert Downey, Jr.) to Watson (Jude Law). In addition, they can tap to watch the new trailer or to visit the Facebook fan page and Twitter account.

"What one man can invent another can discover." - Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Dancing Men

Ad of the Week: AMEX Delta

caitlin.oconnell — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 17:28:36 +0000

We'd like to share a new campaign that is currently running on iPhone and Android phones. This ad from Digitas for the AMEX Delta card features animation, a tile puzzle game, tap to video, and tap to microsite to encourage mobile users to "Find a Solution to Easier Travel."

AMEX reinforces its message of easier travel through a tricky tile puzzle. Users shift the tiles around to solve the image of a smart AMEX traveler, or can tap the AMEX Delta card for an instant solution. Once the puzzle is solved, a new panel showcases a few of the benefits of using AMEX to fly with Delta. Users can opt to learn more by tapping to a video or visiting the AMEX mobile website.

Good luck puzzle solving!

Singapore Flyer

toml — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 05:22:52 +0000

Crisp is proud to be up and running in Singapore! Last week our CTO, Xavier Facon broke up his schedule to speak to a roomful of coders at hackerspace.sg and the week before we got covered by Willis Wee from Penn-Olson. We are looking forward to a big 2012 led by Rosalind Tan, VP and General Manager of Crisp Media's Singapore office.

Where will you see us next? We will be celebrating with partner Smaato at their new Singapore office next week, then next year on February 2-3 we will attend Penn-Olson's Startup Asia. After that we'll be speaking at the MMA Forum April 23-25. Are we missing anything in Singapore? How about elsewhere in Asia? Let us know!

Make your Mobile Ads Unforgettable with Add to Calendar

toml — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:16:00 +0000

Promoting your movie launch, TV show premiere, or big sale via mobile advertising will increase brand awareness, create brand preference, and influence purchase intent. Now you can turn intent into reality by tapping the power of the mobile device with Add to Calendar. Crisp's new Add to Calendar ad feature allows you to prompt consumers to add your event to their calendar -- making it unforgettable.

Perfect for movie studios, media companies, retailers, and even CPG advertisers promoting a product launch, Add to Calendar invites consumers to add your event to their calendar directly from the ad itself. After tapping to add to calendar, the consumer is asked to agreed to subscribe to your calendar and the event is added directly to the calendar on their device. Add to Calendar is available for browser-based campaigns running on iOS devices.

Watch how it works:

Make Add to Calendar part of your next mobile campaign. Contact Crisp Sales.

Make your Mobile Ads More Social with Crisp Birdfeed

toml — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:58:06 +0000

Crisp Birdfeed helps make mobile ads more social. Using the Crisp Birdfeed ad feature, mobile advertisers can integrate live Twitter feeds directly into their Adhesion^TM ads, connecting mobile consumers with the brands' community and conversation around the ad or product. Crisp Birdfeed provides publishers with an ad offering that incorporates social content in a new and unique way -- without requiring user logins or pulling visitors away from the content and into a social site.

Running in an Adhesion ad placement, Birdfeed incorporates advertiser Twitter feeds using the brand's Twitter account or hashtag. Consumers can tap to expand the ad to see the featured Tweets in a scrollable Twitter feed, and then tap through to the brand's Twitter profile or shared links. Birdfeed also offers multiple touch hotspots and a customizable feed display.

Watch how it works:

Want to use Birdfeed in your next campaign? Contact Crisp Sales.

Ad of the Week: Hitachi

caitlin.oconnell — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:53:58 +0000

This week's featured ad highlights a rich media campaign for Hitachi. Crisp partnered with creative agency Gotham to bring this ad into the Bloomberg Businessweek app for iPad.

Discover more about Hitachi's environmental solutions as you guide your finger along a dotted path in this touch creative for iPad. Each "step" activates a pop-up offering bite-size information on a specific Hitachi initiative, which you can chose to opt out of and keep going. Once you've swiped through to the end of the road, you can revisit any of the pop-ups you passed along the way or tap for the Hitachi microsite.

Ad of the Week: HP ePrint

caitlin.oconnell — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 15:18:42 +0000

This week we are featuring HP's ePrint mobile rich media campaign. Crisp worked with OMD's Airwave and Proximity to get this up and running on Yahoo! and ESPN's mobile websites for iPhone and Android.

Much like the HP ePrint service itself, which is centered around convenience with web-connected printers, this campaign offers users the option of scrolling through the entire ad or tapping on whichever panel interests them. The sleek, vertically-oriented creative guides users through the ePrint experience, including a how-to instruction guide, a video of the service in action and a tap-thru gallery of featured HP printers. Finally, the ad allows users to locate their nearest retailer by zip code.

Ad of the Week: Audi A6

caitlin.oconnell — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:51:55 +0000

We are starting a new blog series called Ad of the Week. Each week we will feature a new rich media campaign powered by Crisp Media. Be sure to subscribe to our blog for weekly updates, or visit our Ad Showcase regularly to see featured campaigns.

This week's feature, the new Audi A6 campaign, is running on a variety of mobile websites on iPhone and Android such as Bloomberg, CNN, and CNNMoney. AKQA San Francisco leveraged the Crisp Engage platform to develop and deploy an amazing creative to show that the new Audi A6 makes the road "An Intelligent Place."

This animated takeover features a full-screen overlay to a mobile site. The ad makes it rain on the screen via a transparent panel that steadily fades to black as the raindrops overtake the site background. The new A6 then tears across the screen, leaving a wake in the rainwater behind it. The ad concludes with a final image of the car and the option to learn more about its special features.

Crisp launches full support for MRAID

xavier — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:38:24 +0000

Today the IAB made an exciting announcement that we've been anticipating for the last 10 months, which was to release the 1.0 version of the new MRAID standard for in-app advertising. MRAID, put as simply as possible, enables in-app ads to expand. The features that such an 'expansion' unlocks for HTML5 advertising is quite significant. MRAID by creating a recognized standard implementation for mobile advertising is ensuring that mobile will remain a hotbed of advertising innovation.

We are happy to announce that Crisp is launching support for MRAID v.1.0, the common ad creation API for mobile rich media ads. Crisp played a pioneering role in the creation of this necessary digital advertising standard, and with MRAID the industry has made the essential step of agreeing to principles and guidelines that make mobile rich media ads compatible with ad serving SDKs.

In support of MRAID, ad units that are hosted on the Crisp Rich Media platform can be served in any mobile application that is MRAID compliant. These ad units can include amazing HTML5 animations and the full spectrum of Crisp's rich media serving and tracking capabilities. Details on MRAID can be found here on the IAB website.

Crisp is now supporting both MRAID and ORMMA. ORMMA is an open source group that laid the groundwork for MRAID and continues to develop leading edge features that are not yet ready for approval as industry standards. Anything that is specified in the MRAID documentation version 1.0 today is fully supported and compatible if not identical to the ORMMA specifications. ORMMA will continue to introduce new features to be reviewed with new MRAID versions as they are approved in the future with the goal of keeping ORMMA and MRAID on the path to total convergence as quickly as possible. In fact, Crisp will provide technical support for MRAID implementations via the ORMMA open source community to its customers. SDK vendors or app developers who want to test their MRAID compliance can also request test ad units from Crisp.

We thank the IAB, many key players in the industry and the ORMMA community for their active role in the development of MRAID.

To find out how to develop and deploy rich media advertising for MRAID compliant mobile applications on iPhone, Android and iPad contact us for more information.

Smooth as Silk for iPads, iPhones, and Android

toml — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:49:46 +0000

We expect Amazon's Silk browser to be amazing. There are a few reasons. First, it is backed by Amazon's cloud. Second, the Silk browser is limited to WiFi only, which means that the underpowered tablet device will shine because WiFi plus server-side compiled HTML5 will work great for delivering websites to Kindle Fires. How do we know it will be Amazing? Well, we don't have access to a Kindle Fire yet (no one we know does either, arggh!) but Crisp Media has been using the same technology architecture to deliver mobile advertising to iPhones, iPads, and Androids for years and that's how we make rich media work well on low-powered, low-bandwidth devices on both 3G and WiFi connections.

Split personalities

Crisp's technology for delivering rich advertising to iPads, which can be seen here, is the culmination of two years worth of work related to optimizing advertising for any screen size, called Crisp Adhesion^TM. The technological framework that delivers this ad unit is built to deliver ad banners separately from the page content. Adhesion is the only ad banner that is optimized for touch screen navigation, in that it overlays the page so that it can adhere itself to the bottom of the page after scrolling and keeps its resolution when a user pinches or zooms.

Finally, our ad serving architecture compiles the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files on the server side so that the browser on any smartphone or tablet device benefits, not only from the ad being loaded separately from the page, but also because the ad is compiled on the server side to accelerate ad serving speeds.

We will be very interested to test just how well the Kindle Fire's Silk browser performs on November 15th (or sooner if we are able to get our hands on a device.) In addition, we are excited that our customers will now understand just how powerful an approach to advertising it is to have an ad serving solution that splits the work of the browser as much as possible to be handled on the server side.

Does this approach benefit In-App advertising too?

Yes. Although apps are built in native code, the best way to deliver advertising content is to use web views within apps, and HTML5 advertising standards like MRAID and ORMMA make this possible. In addition to server side compiling, in-app ad servers are being adjusted via the work of the ORMMA.org group to now handle pre-caching capabilities. With pre-caching, advertisements and content can be both delivered as widgets to specified ad zones or panels within an app. For example, by enabling pre-caching, iPad apps will be able to take advantage of both server side compilation and background loading of HTML5 scripts and assets.

Will iOS5 or Honeycomb do anything that Kindle Fire can't?

Yes. iOS5 and Honeycomb enable the fixed position support capability that was until now just on the roadmap for HTML5. This makes Adhesion an even more flexible placement on those devices and provides for a very similar look and feature delivery of Adhesion across all HTML5 browsers on mobile devices, tablets, and desktop browsers.

Want to know more about Adhesion mobile ad placements? Watch this.

IAB issues MRAID guidelines for public comment

xavier — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 17:22:51 +0000

For a little more than a year, Crisp has partnered with mobile stakeholders including publishers, ad networks, creative agencies and other rich media companies for the creation of a standard interface definition for mobile rich media ad units.

Today, this initiative that was started by the ORMMA consortium and later handed over to an IAB Working Group has produced MRAID, the Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definition.

"Standardizing the development of mobile rich media creative will be a strong benefit for both the mobile and the ad industry overall," said Anna Bager, Vice President & General Manager of the IAB's Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence. "MRAID provides creative developers with opportunities to achieve reach and scale efficiently."

Crisp's technology and the ORMMA APIs are being updated to be 100% compatible with the final MRAID specification when it is released. This means that Crisp Rich Media ads can be served in any application that has MRAID support or has ORMMA support.

For more details, vie the full release.

Summer Blockbusters! Crisp's Latest Mobile Advertising Report

tom — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 13:58:36 +0000

It has been a big summer here at Crisp, and we wanted to share the interactive data that we've collected across the Entertainment advertising campaigns that we've run in Q2 and Q3. Many studios have run campaigns with Crisp and although some may say that some of the films themselves may not have been crowd pleasers, there's no doubt that the mobile rich media ads were engaging for all the films we displayed this summer.

The infographic below highlights in aggregate numbers how mobile rich media ads for Entertainment fared against all other ad verticals combined, and compared those with standard mobile banners. Here are some selected examples of campaigns that were featured in the report, (note-these are just a sample of the total and the individual stats for each of these campaigns are not revealed in this report.)

Also, we put a special focus in this report on comparing iPhone vs. Android usage data. We attribute the fact that iPhone users are more into gestures like 'swipe' to their comparative comfort level and 'training' on iOS over the past few years as MG Siegler pointed out last year. Based on client requests we've also put a big focus on how users reacted to advertiser calls to action, e.g. CTA's for video trailers, like on social networks, purchase tickets and download apps for this report.

Finally, we found that Crisp's Adhesion placement, performed even better than the average for rich media banner interaction rates and that animated text or images created a 4.5x multiplier for any type of banner. Sit back and enjoy the report - and let us know if you'd like to learn more about Crisp rich media.

View PDF

Registration for Chicago Event on Mobile Rich Media Advertising Now Open

tamara — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 17:33:31 +0000

Have you been wondering what major brands are doing in mobile? Or maybe curious which ad formats, devices, or ad features are most engaging to your audience? Come get a glimpse at the latest mobile campaigns in automotive, entertainment, technology, CPG, and more. Get the inside scoop on Crisp Rich Media Benchmarks for Automotive and Entertainment industries to see which ad formats perform better, which devices and platforms garner the best response, and what ad features, like swiping, sharing, and watching videos, elicit the most consumer engagement.

Join Crisp Media on Wednesday, September 21st from 5-6:30 pm at the Hard Rock Hotel as we cover the latest and greatest in mobile rich media, including the newest ad formats and an overview of using Crisp Engage to create, manage, and measure campaigns. Stick around after the presentation for drinks upstairs in the Byrdland/Firebird room from 6:30- 8:00 pm and meet our new Regional Sales Manager, Doug Hoenig.

Event Registration Online for The Latest and Greatest in Mobile Rich Media Advertising powered by Eventbrite

AdMarvel supports Crisp ad formats in apps via ORMMA

xavier — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 15:41:23 +0000

Last week, AdMarvel announced their collaboration with ORMMA to Launch their New SDKs for iOS and Android that leverage the standard APIs for rich media ads. Crisp's rich media platform has been used for building, managing, measuring and serving numerous campaigns into applications integrated with AdMarvel's previous SDKs, which was a temporary solution that worked fine for single publisher campaigns. However, that setup was not ideal for campaigns that were served to multiple applications, where some apps use AdMarvel's SDK and other apps implement a different SDK, Crisp had to provide multiple variants of the ad creative to different applications. We are seeing more campaigns that need to be served across multiple applications so this upgrade is coming at a very good time for advertisers.

The latest ad SDKs from AdMarvel, now joins the growing list of ad SDKs that avoid this level of ad serving complication by supporting the ORMMA ad creative API. Crisp's mantra is to make ad operations easy for our customers. Congrats to AdMarvel for making it easier to serve rich ads in applications. We are looking forward to similar announcements from the other in-app ad SDK providers later this summer.

MMA Announces Support for ORMMA; Kicks off the Mobile Marketing Forum in NYC

toml — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 21:08:20 +0000

It is a big week for the MMA. The Mobile Marketing Forum kicks off in NYC today and Crisp will be sponsoring with CEO Boris Fridman will be speaking on a panel regarding Understanding Mobile Advertising. In addition to kicking off the MMF, the Mobile Marketing Association also announced supported for ORMMA, the Open Rich Media Mobile Advertising initiative. By showing its support for ORMMA, the MMA extends the reach of open standards internationally and lends its weight to overcoming the fragmentation plaguing mobile advertisers.

Since ORMMA was founded in 2010 by Crisp Media and The Weather Channel; the initiative has grown to more than 20 member companies from across the mobile advertising ecosystem, including AdMarvel, Admeld, Celtra, Gannett, Goldspot Media, mOcean, Nexage, PointRoll, Ringleader Digital, Rhythm NewMedia and others. ORMMA has been working with both the IAB and the MMA to push forward open standards for building, serving, and measuring rich media mobile ads. Just as ORMMA contributed its ad creative API to the IAB to make it the basis of their MRAID standard, ORMMA will work with the MMA to contribute ideas and experience to help build an open and scalable mobile rich media landscape.

The goal of ORMMA is to allow ad developers to create one campaign that can run across a universe of mobile applications and sites, without sacrificing a rich user experience. Since its founding, ORMMA has developed a specification for an open API that unlocks all native capabilities for iOS and Android devices, allowing advertisers to create ads using HTML5 standards that can access all the native features of the device, such as location, shaking, and more. ORMMA is also developing capabilities that ORMMA-compliant developers can include in their advertising SDKs, including support for ad caching, polite loading, and increased privacy controls.

Companies interested in joining ORMMA should visit the ORMMA blog, join the Discussion Group, or visit the Google Code Project. Read the press release to learn more about MMA’s support of ORMMA.

Crisp Talks Tablet Advertising with MPA Publishers

toml — Thu, 12 May 2011 21:02:57 +0000

This afternoon, Crisp discussed tablet advertising with some top publishers at the "Meet the Innovators" luncheon at the MPA, The Association of Magazine Media. It was great to see such a large turnout of publishers. After our discussion about the tablet advertising market and best practices, we had a chance to visit the MPA's soon-to-be-opened Magazine Media Lab and got our hands on the new HP Slate. These are exciting times for publishers but also challenging to keep up with the market fragmentation.

To learn more about best practices for tablet advertising design and ad serving, be sure to check out our presentation:

Everything you Need to Know about Tablet Advertising

View more presentations from Crisp Media

If you are a publisher, are you capitalizing on the traffic visiting your website from tablet browsers to cross-promote your tablet application? If you want to learn how, contact us at sales@crispmedia.com.

The Big Day

toml — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 15:24:54 +0000

We've been waiting for this moment at Crisp for a long time. Mobile advertising has long been recognized as having the greatest global potential for delivering reach and scale for brands. It was not, however, until recently that we at Crisp started noticing something great. Big, full-screen Crisp ads that had always been in English started showing up in Chinese on our test iPads here in our Midtown HQ in NYC.

Yesterday's post in TechCrunch about Crisp’s new round of funding, led by a new investor, EDBI of Singapore, was a great reminder to us all that Crisp is ready to help its publishers bring great brand experiences to a lot more iPhone, iPad and Android devices around the world, starting right now.

Crisp, together with the other ORMMA.org pioneers, is working together closely with IAB and MMA working groups on bringing the necessary standardization initiatives and best practices to the attention of agencies, ad tech companies and publishers.

That means that as more publisher and ad network ad servers become compliant with some key standards (like IAB’s MRAID), brands will be able to run ads like they do in desktop advertising, without friction and with an even wider geographic distribution than ever before -- especially since the iOS and Android platforms are growing globally much faster than any other platforms ever have. Starting now, the model of competition in mobile advertising is about what it should be, creating the most dynamic advertising possible.

Stay tuned for news about Crisp Engage next week. Crisp Engage is launching its Charter Program, and we are calling on creative agencies who’d like to show off their HTML5 skills, or play with some of the templates we’ve been building over the past two years to create brand experiences for mobile apps and browsers.

And BTW, for those of you making the trip to Singapore next week, meet Boris Fridman and Xavier Facon in Singapore at the Mobile Marketing Association’s MMF Forum on the 3rd through 5th of May!

Everything you Need to Know about Tablet Advertising Comes to CA

tamara — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:06:52 +0000

If are in Southern CA and are curious about Tablet Advertising, or want to learn more about Tablet Advertising best practices, be sure to check out our event on April 6th. After a sold out event in NYC, we are taking the presentation on the road with even more examples of rich media advertising on iPads and tablets.

What's new in the tablet market
Examples of current tablet campaigns
Best practices for designing in-app and browser tablet ads
Best practices for serving into apps & browsers
Measuring tablet campaign success
Tablet ad formats

We hope to see you there! Register below:

Online event registration for What you Need to Know about Tablet Advertising powered by Eventbrite

A mobile guide to 2011 SXSW Interactive

toml — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 15:36:10 +0000

SXSW 2011 is upon us and in no particular order I have lumped together what I think are the apps that will fight for my thumbs from Thursday 3/10 to Tuesday 3/15.

I have left out the photosharing apps here like facebook, instagram, picplz, tumblr, and I have also left out the best reference, the Sched.org mobile website where I have picked out a panel and party agenda (official parties only) and plancast but these posterity pic-ers and schedule gatherers are not the focus of SXSWi for me. For me, the fun is in the hunt. The hunt that I'm talking about is the hunt for the best of everything in Austin, and these apps are most likely how I will find them. More accurately these apps will help me cheat off of those SXSW A-listers who have arrived before I have.

The 2011 SXSWi apps:

bump, hashable, yobongo, foodspotting, beluga, groupme, ditto!, LoKast, rdio, foursquare, twitter and HeyTell are going to be my signals. Will I be as excited about them on 3/15 as I am now? Definitely not, hence the precarious 'x's. Why have I chosen these above all others? If you are wondering why constrain myself at all, you're right Fred Wilson had a great post about mobile notifications on 3/1 which shows Android's superior notifications architecture for letting you have more and more engagement apps on without relying on them all to be on your home screen. But with 144 apps on my phone post cleanup this week (I had 6.6 gb of apps, was getting close to my limit on 16gb iPhone 4), I felt it was time to focus on what could fit in a folder (12), and since on top of that there's a tremendous amount of overlap in this group, here is my reasoning for why each of them gets a spot in the SXSWi folder. (for the record I hate iOS folders :) )

bump, intros, sharing contacts, sharing apps, sharing music, chat with contacts

hashable, intros

yobongo, meeting new people when chatting about panels / parties, deciding on things

foodspotting, figuring out the best bbq!

beluga, chatting with housemates, prepping with panel participants

groupme, finding friends, chatting, sharing links / photos to make people laugh

ditto!, deciding on things, crowdsourcing plans for the day / evening, pushing serrendipity

LoKast, sharing songs, photos with people nearby

rdio, searching for and downloading music, checking out what friends at SXSW are listening to

foursquare, finding out what's next, being findable, posting photos, finding addresses

twitter commenting on everything, seeing what's trending, sharing with people back home

HeyTell chatting with housemates like I'm on a Sprint Nextell / Boost phone or walkie talkie!

Those 12 Angry Apps are not the whole story. There are a class of apps that are invisible, they are API services that are plugging into one of those above apps, most likely Foursquare or Twitter.

These aftermarket, app-boosting services are going to be providing more than their share of the fun at SXSWi. These are clearly extra credit apps, but if you have time to set these up you might be surprised at how funny make your social experience:

Tweetgrabber, a friend, Matt Newberg who I met at SXSWi last year just launched this ingenious service which helps you follow specifically someone's Favorites on Twitter and lets you store them in your unread Instapaper. This is a wormhole into the psyche of those you'd like to follow on twitter, so much more revealing than reading what they choose to tell you on Twitter.

Assisted Serendipity, another brilliantly devised and simple service that hooks into Foursquare and emails you based on the 10 venues that you think will most likely have desirables of the opposite sex in attendance. The way to set up this service is you put the number of the Foursquare number (which comes after the 'venue/' in the 4sq URL) and set the female : male ratio (or vice versa) to your liking and wait for assisted serendity to send you an email with those profiles so you can decide whether or not to go.

Don't Eat.at This service as the picture shows can be hilarious if mixed with other food apps like foodspotting. Basically, if you are going to use this app, make sure that you check-in before you foodspot! However, I mentioned this only because it was funny, in truth, this is currently a NYC only app, so I guess donteat.at won't spoil your fun in Austin!

For those of you who have not been to SXSW interactive before, then here's my advice for gearing up.

This is a picture of my pre-SXSW stockup. I'm going to be staying up by UT Austin at a house that we've named HxSW II, casa chalupa, so I have rented a bike, and am bringing the New York Lock by Kryptonite with a deterrent that goes to '11'. I'm also bringing a Mophie Juice Pack: Boost which is the largest charger available that plugs into the bottom of an iPhone. It gives ~1 full charge but is still pretty discreet even when attached to the phone in your front pocket and has a carabiner for carrying on a belt loop / back pocket when you're not using it.

Also, on my trip to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress I bought a Monster Power Outlets to Go 3 with USB. For times when you have plugs near you (like near the stage at Stubbs!) this small outlet strip will come in handy to power up more than 1 device at a time. Actually, I had even grander power plans but waited too long to get one of these solar panels from Voltaic for my backpack.

I agree with Fashism's post that bringing regular running sneakers are not necessary at SXSW, but, I would disagree about bringing sneakers in general. There's a ton of walking going on at SXSWi and the daily fashion show that I've seen for the past 3 years has been about cool t-shirts and kicks, so remember to bring yours! Also, although it's pretty dry in Texas, many of the best events day or night have an outdoor component to them, like an outdoor courtyard (remember the rainy 4sq party last year?) or roofdeck so there's a very good chance you'll get caught in the rain at some point. Try to stash a rain jacket somewhere on you when rain threatens.

Remember to come and see Check-in 2 Check-out: Mobile Audience Engagement in 2011 on Tuesday 3/15 at 9:30 at the Hyatt! Let us... @jakemintz, @foolazy, @ladylexy, @BB_iojbegun and @toms ...know when you've checked in on Sitby.us

and now for the uberlink with all the links from this post and beyond that might be useful to you in Austin.

Couldn't Make the Tablet Advertising Sneak Peek Event? Here are the slides.

tamara — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 16:57:19 +0000

Thank you to everyone that came down to The Crosby Street Hotel Screening Room yesterday to join us for a "Sneak Peek at Tablet Advertising for 2011." For those that couldn't attend and wanted to see the presentation, as well as for those of you that wanted a copy of the presentation, we've embedded the slides and the videos below.

Still want more? If you couldn't make it or have more questions, we will be running a live webinar soon. Leave a comment below to make sure you are on the invite list!

Tablet Advertising for 2011

View more presentations from Crisp Media.

Videos of Current Campaign Examples:

ESPN Ad running in iPad Browser from Crisp Media on Vimeo.

Reuters Ad in The Wall Street Journal iPad App from Crisp Media on Vimeo.

Microsoft CRM Ad in The Wall Street Journal iPad App from Crisp Media on Vimeo.

Hyundai Equus Tablet Ad from Crisp Media on Vimeo.

IBM Smarter Cities Rich Media Campaign on iPad from Crisp Media on Vimeo.

Chevy Cruze Tablet Ad from Crisp Media on Vimeo.

Join Us for a Sneak Peek at Tablet Advertising for 2011

tamara — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 21:10:41 +0000

If you are wondering what is coming this year in Tablet Advertising, be sure to attend our upcoming presentation, "Tablet Advertising Sneak Peek." The event takes place on February 22nd from 3-5 pm at The Screening Room at The Crosby Street Hotel.

All agencies and publishers are welcome to join us as we talk about market trends, iPad campaigns, ad serving and design best practices, and new ad formats and capabilities for running rich media campaigns in tablet browsers and applications.

See the latest and greatest in Tablet Advertising and join us after this exclusive sneak peek for drinks at The Crosby Street Bar.

And if you haven't already seen it, be sure to read Tom Limongello's recent article in Mobile Marketer on The Year of the Tablet Browser.

Event management for Tablet Advertising Sneak Peek powered by Eventbrite

The State of Rich Media In-App Advertising

toml — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 23:00:00 +0000

We shared this video in Monday's ORMMA Webinar: Creating ORMMA Compliant Mobile Apps & Ads. It really puts the problem of serving rich media ads into mobile applications into perspective and we thought you'd enjoy it.

The webinar was a who's who in the mobile industry, and we are thrilled to see the interest and involvement in the ORMMA initiative to drive open standards for mobile rich media advertising. If you happened to miss it, you can still take a look at the slides.

Creating ORMMA Compliant Mobile Apps

View more presentations from Crisp Media.

To learn more about ORMMA and find out about future webinars, check out the ORMMA blog.

Why 2011 Will be the Year of the Tablet Browser

toml — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 19:19:51 +0000

Some have surmised that 2010 was the year of the iPad. Well, I propose that 2011 will be the year of the Tablet browser. We all know that tablet sales are expected to boom this year. We also know that major publishers are preparing their online properties to support tablets as we see the amount of traffic and commerce that is coming from tablet browsers.

Read more about why 2011 will be the year of the tablet browser and what this means for brands and advertisers in my recent article in Mobile Marketer, "Why Brands Should Focus More on the Tablet Browser."

You can also read more at http://bit.ly/bundles/tlimongello/6.

And for those Men in Black Fans out there, we aren't the only ones who revere the tablet (see :58):

Webinar: Building ORMMA Compliant Mobile Apps, SDKs and Ads

toml — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:34:08 +0000

Since the launch of ORMMA last fall, many vendors and publishers have joined the discussion group and gotten started creating ORMMA compliant apps and SDKs. We want to share these learnings to help others become ORMMA compliant and spread the adoption of open standards to serving mobile rich media advertising.

Please join us on Monday, January 31, 2011 from 1-2pm ET for a webinar featuring technology leads from Crisp Media, The Weather Channel, PointRoll, Jumptap, and TringApps to learn how to create ORMMA compliant mobile applications and SDKs, and design ORMMA compliant ads.

Register today!

The session will cover:
1:00 Welcome and ORMMA update
1:10 Demo of ORMMA web testing client (Nathan Carver, Crisp Media)
1:25 Discussion on developing the ORMMA SDK (Casey Dement and Robert Hedin, The Weather Chanel)
1:45 Code Group Panelists, Q&A
2:00 Call ends

Panelists for Q&A
Todd Pasternack, PointRoll
Neal Karasic, Jumptap
Nathan Carver, Crisp Media
Casey Dement, The Weather Chanel
Robert Hedin, The Weather Chanel
Tarun Gaur, TringApps

We hope you can join us! Don’t forget to register to reserve your spot! To learn more about ORMMA, visit the ORMMA blog.

IBM's Smarter Cities Ad Named Best iPad Campaign

tamara — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 14:55:46 +0000

We have some good news to share! Last week, Crisp, along with Ogilvy, won the DigiDay Publishing and Advertising Award for Best iPad Campaign. Many congratulations go out to the Ogilvy team for extending this campaign to tablets in such a unique and creative way.

If you didn’t see IBM’s Smarter Cities campaign in The Wall Street Journal’s iPad app, check out the video below. This campaign offered readers so many ways to interact with the ad including: tilting to activate, viewing animation, using the touch screen to navigate the city, tapping on hot spots to launch videos, and entering data to request more info.

Make your next campaigns award winning. Crisp rich media provides the engagement and metrics your clients require – across all devices, Web browsers, and mobile app platforms. So as you are planning your Q1 ad buys, think about Crisp and contact us at sales@crispmedia.com.

Season of Change: Crisp Wireless Becomes Crisp Media

toml — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Crisp has built a strong reputation as the leading rich media advertising provider for the mobile Web; running campaigns with leading brands and partnering with top-notch premium publishers and ad networks. But we aren’t just about the mobile Web, or just about mobile for that matter.

Crisp offers a universal rich media ad platform for building, delivering, and measuring interactive campaigns across many platforms and devices – including desktop and mobile Web, mobile apps, tablets, and soon, connected TVs. So calling ourselves Crisp Wireless just doesn’t make sense anymore.

That is why today we are changing our name to Crisp Media.

“In 2011, we will see the full integration of mobile into digital advertising strategies as agencies and publishers prepare to execute ad buys across multiple properties, devices, and platforms,” said Boris Fridman, CEO of Crisp Media. “We are breaking down these silos and removing obstacles to enable the industry to move forward--with HTML5-based rich media ad formats; multi-platform, open ad delivery; and unified engagement metrics. It is a no-brainer that our name should reflect our mission to deliver rich, interactive ads to all media.”

You can find us at http://www.crispmedia.com. Committed to powering rich media advertising across all media using open standards.

ORMMA breaking the limits on Rich Media for mobile?

ncarver — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 05:00:00 +0000

(Originally posted on the ORMMA blog)

Creating rich media takes a lot of work. Enough work so that creators are forced to justify their investments. And if you can't justify the time and money it takes, then cheaper solutions prevail. Less-rich media fills the void.

ORMMA is about doing more than just filling up ad space. It's about being able to create compelling ads – the kind that takes creative work – and getting a return on your investment. Wide ORMMA adoption means a wide-ranging audience. For truly rich media ad units. And that's a pay off for consumers as well as advertisers and publishers.

So ORMMA is not another SDK. It is a specification that any SDK can comply with to eliminate choices that limit designers. Instead it provides new choices that promote truly rich media creative on mobile.

For example, today creative development on mobile begins with choice – choices that limit your audience. Choose a platform. Will you focus on one or more of iPhone, iPad, Android devices (1.2 or 2.0), WindowsMobile, RIM, Palm? Choose a screen. 320x480, 768x1024, 480x800, landscape or portrait? Choose a technology. Webkit, Java, ObjectiveC, Flash, Silverlight?

Each one of these choices limits what you can do, where you can place your ad, and ultimately limits the time and money you invest to develop great ads. With these kinds of limits, creativity itself is limited. What else can rich media ads become except ads for the lowest common denominator?

So the first principle of ORMMA is to remove those limits. ORMMA provides designers with technology they already know – HTML5 – and a container to run it on modern mobile devices. Choosing to create rich media with ORMMA standards removes the need to choose between competing platforms, OS, or technology. Web and ad designers use the tools they already have to independently create compelling ads.

But to me, the larger reward of ORMMA is that it increases your rich media options. The many features of today’s smart phones – hardware features like GPS, accelerometer, compass, yes even the phone – are exposed for ad designers to use. (Yes, location based services are already available with HTML5 and even phone calls are possible, but with different protocols for different phones.) ORMMA creates a bridge to all the hardware capabilities for any designer with HTML5 and JavaScript skills. Today’s spec (http://code.google.com/p/ormma/) outlines support for these features

network - device reports on its network connectivity
orientation - device reports on orientation changes
screen - device reports on the screen size
heading - device reports compass direction
location - device reports its location
shake - device reports being shaken
sms - device can send an SMS message
tilt - device report any tilt changes
phone - device can make a phone call
email - device can compose email
calendar - device can create a calendar entry
camera - device can take a picture

With this level of support available to designers, the classic maze game becomes easy. And be more rich. With a shake to start over. Using the current desktop as a board. That stores a coupon in the camera roll if they win. A designer can test this on a mobile browser (there are ORMMA containers for the web, too!) and then push it out confidently to Android, iPhone, iPad, WindowsMobile without modifications.

ORMMA means that the stuff that makes mobile exciting – location and spatial awareness, on-the-go video, high-res vibrant screens, HD audio, photo gallery, calendar, email, phone and SMS – this is the stuff that everyone can use to make rich media ads exciting. It’s all built into the ORMMA specification.

It’s easy to use. Here’s the code to start up and get location-based data.

ORMMA.addEventListener('location', myLocationHandler);

So what does it mean about investing in rich media on mobile? To me it means that the bar for the lowest common denominator has been raised. The cost to create immersive experiences that engage users has dropped. And the return on that investment has extended to a larger audience without compromise. So my question is, what rich media experience will you create with ORMMA? The work you put into it can finally pay off.

Mobile Advertising Measurement Guidelines are Emerging

xavier — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 17:00:38 +0000

The unique attributes of mobile devices and mobile ad networks have made it difficult to trust the accuracy of campaign reports provided by mobile ad servers or the usage reports of mobile sites and applications. Crisp sometimes provides 3rd party reports to publishers or agencies that show significant discrepancies against the reports of other measurement servers. Regardless of which report is right or wrong, this issue has been a major barrier to effectively sell mobile media to advertisers.

The staff of the IAB and the MMA, together with the MRC and the GSMA and two dozen other mobile companies (including Crisp), have recently written the ‘Mobile Web Advertising Measurement Guidelines’. This document has now been released for public comment. This document provides some general guidelines as well as mobile specific guidelines. These 22 pages are a good step forward towards providing the different parties a way of determining the quality of their measurements.

In a white paper Crisp wrote last month, ‘Measurement on Mobile,’ we dug a little deeper into the different causes of the mobile measurement accuracy problems. Our white paper provides a history and overview of the mobile measurement methods, followed by a list of potential problems and ends with some basic recommendations.

The mobile ecosystem has witnessed extreme growth and continuing fragmentation, but methods are now available to extend the mature desktop ad serving infrastructure into mobile without introducing the many mobile measurement problems that were typical in the past. If you are involved in mobile advertising, I recommend reading both the IAB-MMA guidelines and the Crisp white paper (embedded below).

Measurement on Mobile - Crisp Oct 2010

Crisp Talks Rich Media Ads on the IM-Mobile Podcast

tamara — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:40:42 +0000

Crisp CEO Boris Fridman recently appeared on the IM-Mobile podcast to talk about rich media ads with host Brian Prows. A lot has changed in the last year since we last caught up with Brian including:

Exploding growth of Android devices taking mobile advertising outside of the iPhone-only domain and making cross-platform solutions even more important
The tablet ushers in a new era for print publishers and new opportunities for advertisers to engage consumers
Apple introduced its iAd ad network and opened doors when it comes to mobile rich media
Advertisers have come to the table with significant budget for mobile

Hear Brian and Boris discuss all this and more over at the IM-Mobile blog. If you aren't a subscriber yet, check it out for great interviews with industry executives.