Everyone has a favorite barista or retail associate who knows how to make the perfect recommendation. These essential workers we meet in our everyday lives are attentive to our needs and work with us to find the best solution. 

But while traditional advertising strives to anticipate how consumers are feeling, the one-size-fits makes it difficult to truly offer that level of helpfulness at scale. So, what if you could converse with an ad just like you would with a person? With AdLingo, you can.

Always-On Conversations at Scale

Developed in Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator, AdLingo enables brands to embed conversational assistants (like chatbots) within display ads. These ads are distributed on Google partner inventory by Google Display and Video 360, reaching users across the web and within web apps. The conversational platform offers brands a simple way to adopt an “always-on” customer acquisition model that engages users while they browse online, ready to meet their needs wherever your audience may find a display ad.

Quick to implement, they offer personalization at scale by asking users directly about their needs and preferences and dynamically providing relevant information based on the user’s inputs—making AdLingo a great way to qualify leads and gain insights on your target audience. This level of personalization also makes the format more engaging, with users spending about one minute and 17 seconds on average in conversation with the bot, according to January/December 2020 average results from AdLingo.

Continuously Improve Charisma—and Effectiveness

AdLingo ads are relatively quick to produce and scale up, going from idea to launch in only four to six weeks. But it’s important to understand that AdLingo campaigns are most effective when optimized over time, continuously enhancing the user experience. By measuring conversation, engagement, depth of outcome and more, brands can A/B test on the fly to identify how different copy or logic variations perform. Constant iteration makes it easier for users to find the best solution for their needs and take the intended action, like visiting a landing page or converting.

Best Practices for Your First AdLingo Experience

Because an AdLingo campaign should be continuously optimized to better meet consumers’ needs over time, it’s ideal to let one run for two or three months at minimum. This is critical to ensure your campaign has enough time (and engagement volume) to accurately assess performance and optimize. And due to the format’s always-on acquisition model, AdLingo should ideally support a larger campaign than stand on its own; apply measurable insights from AdLingo conversations to optimize the broader campaign.

As for the user experience, start the conversation off with a compelling hook that engages the user. Focus on empowering questions rather than taking a negative tone, and make it clear that the user is talking to a virtual assistant, not a real person. And while open dialogue is supported by the format, pre-written responses help direct the consumer and make it easier for users to answer quickly.

How Nespresso Brewed a High-Performance Bot

When Nespresso wanted to convince customers to consider Nespresso as a one-stop destination for holiday-season gifts, the coffee brand partnered with AdLingo and MediaMonks to build a display ad that would help consumers in the US and the UK discover the perfect gift. Much like a personality quiz, the chatbot asked users a series of questions that identified the best gift for their chosen recipient and budget, boosting the perception of Nespresso as a premium gifting option.

The brand lift study ran in the UK showed a 119% significant lift in ad recall and a 75% lift in brand consideration compared to top three competitors¹. 0.43% of impressions led to engaged conversations² in the UK, and 15% of engaged users across both countries answered all six criteria questions to receive their personalized recommendation. “The new AdLingo Ads proved a powerful solution to connect in a personalized way and at scale with consumers and position Nespresso as a great gifting option,” says Paulo R. Dias, Nespresso Global Brand Campaigns Manager. “Our global AdLingo pilot developed with MediaMonks has demonstrated strong results and impact on brand perception, that go beyond our existing channels.”

With AdLingo, brands can achieve great results from simple yet highly engaging experiences. By offering personalized and attentive service anytime, anywhere, the scalable format helps users quickly find the product or info they need—leaving them better equipped to convert. Likewise, AdLingo serves as another channel brands can draw from to capture insights that help them better understand their audience’s needs.

¹ Brand Lift Study run on mobile app among people who engaged with the ad.

² Users that engaged in the chat for 1+interaction

All sources; internal data AdLingo and Nespresso.

This week, we’re celebrating the birthday of the banner ad, which just turned 25 on October 27. Love them or hate them, banner ads have become a mainstay of the web browsing experience, lining web pages across devices and even showing up within mobile games—but they didn’t always have the ubiquitous digital presence that they enjoy today.

25 years ago, AT&T bought space on HotWired (which became the Wired magazine we know today), to offer a cheeky—if not a bit threatening, in hindsight—banner ad asking, “Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? YOU WILL.” It’s unlikely that a modern, internet-savvy consumer would be tempted to follow through on the message it pushed, but its novelty at the time resulted in an impressive click-through rate of 44%.

Now, we know that today’s users may not be as excited about banner ads as us (we are Google’s first Global Certified Marketing Partner for DoubleClick, after all). To us, banner ads are a bit misunderstood, their image tainted by annoying banners and low-quality work when they were treated largely as an afterthought by creatives. So, what is the state of the banner ad today, and where do its opportunities lie in its maturity? Grab a glass of champagne while we extol our love for the internet’s most ubiquitous format.

Diving Deep into Data

The banner ads of yore may have felt invasive and interrupting, but technology today enables banner ads to better blend in or add value to the user through personalization. The role of programmatic and data have catapulted the simple format into a cog within complex marketing engines that enable brands to learn more about their audiences and tailor content effectively.

“These days, everything is bought in a programmatic way, where ads are serviced to specific users on many different sites,” says Andre Rood, Global Advertising Director at MediaMonks. “That’s why banners have gotten progressively more interesting: the ability to target specific users has improved tremendously, and the metrics—with the ability to measure response and effectivity—have as well.”

In essence, a programmatic landscape has encouraged marketers to look beyond just a click-through rate to measure ad performance and effectiveness, allowing new opportunities to make their content more contextual and useful to consumers. Through continuous optimization of their display ads, brands can achieve a greater value on their ad spend, not to mention a closer understanding of their audience as metrics roll in. Whether employing dynamic assets or manually tweaking assets to respond to data, brands can pinpoint the perfect permutations of imagery, layout and copy in their assets to appeal to audiences through personalization.

Banners Become Truly Interactive

The historic conception of the banner ad—a strip or box of pixels demanding users to view and click—might not seem so exciting today, but today’s banner ads are no longer limited to that definition. Take Google Swirl ads, for example: this innovative, mobile-exclusive ad format features an interactive 3D model that users can touch and rotate to inspect a featured product from any angle—and opening up new moments for storytelling in the process.

Swirl ads are emblematic of the new modes of interaction made possible by mobile. “People are spending less and less time on their computers and more on their phones, so while traditional banners aren’t going anywhere, there’s also new avenues to explore in the mobile space,” says Tommy Lacoste, Senior Project Manager at MediaMonks. Lacoste, whose expertise is in assets that extend beyond the typical banner ad, has worked closely on developing these 3D, interactive banners. “While they’re technically still banner ads, consider them to be the next step,” he says.

What’s impressive about Swirl ads aren’t just their interactivity, but also their mobile friendliness by being so lightweight compared to the rich media that has come before it. “Improvements in cell phone processing power as well as network speed have been imperative in making this a possibility,” says Lacoste, “And by using our and Google’s proprietary tech, we’ve been able to make the 3D files actually smaller than videos.” By comparison, video banner ads hadn’t caught on at the introduction of HTML5 because they were too heavy to provide a comfortable user experience for many.

Facing the Future of the Banner Ad

As we celebrate the history of the humble banner ad and explore recent innovations in the format, what can we look forward to on the horizon? It might be an even more immersive iteration of how users can learn about products and services, much like Swirl. “Imagine the following: you see an ad for, let’s say a coffee maker, on your phone,” says Rood. “You press it, and suddenly you can place the coffee maker in your own home using advanced augmented reality, seeing how it would look on your kitchen counter. I think that’s the next step.”

In fact, even that might soon be a reality. Facebook recently opened new interactive formats for all advertisers, including ads that allow users to try on products through AR. The display ads are a natural fit for products worn on the face (glasses, makeup) thanks to the selfie focus of Facebook’s Camera Effects lenses, but invite users to imagine what could be done with more advanced augmented reality.

“Within the framework of a banner ad being ‘a visual advertisement on the internet that you can click on’–which includes pre-roll video ads, ads on social, etc.–there’s just a world of possibilities nowadays, and it continues to grow,” says Rood. He’s right: as banner ads become more advanced, users may begin to think of them as desirable digital experiences and content in their own right. In this respect, the future of the banner ad looks good.

Take your banners to the next level with data.