Google HTML Thought Leadership

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The Challenge

In the last few years, the U.S. consumer marketplace has seen significant growth in tablet and smartphone adoption, which we recently documented in a study with the CEA, and businesses have been struggling to take advantage of these new advertising mediums. Advertising in a world of multiple screens presents many new opportunities to reach a highly targeted market, but the benefits don’t come without some challenges. In partnership with DoubleClick by Google, we were commissioned to perform research that aimed to understand the obstacles currently facing agencies when buying on and developing for mobile platforms. In addition, it was imperative to capture the trend towards HTML5 as the new standard for web content and digital advertising.

 Google released the full white paper based on the research results, Unlocking The HTML5 Opportunity 

The Solution

The main strategy taken to achieving the objectives was to thoroughly research current trends in the industry in order to form a questionnaire that captured the right information. Given the newness of HTML5, we needed to go beyond traditional secondary research to ensure that the questionnaire was focused and aligned with the target audience of advertising professionals.

  • Qualitative exploration: Individuals from both media and creative agencies were interviewed to hone in on the appropriate language and lists to use in the quantitative portion of the study. From these interviews we collected information about the current media landscape, tools used, challenges and the future of digital marketing campaigns.
  • Quantitative survey: Using the results from the qualitative phase a quantitative questionnaire was developed to answer our objectives using an online survey methodology. At this point, the language was tweaked so it resonated with media, creative and production individuals. Taking the time to make sure the messages came across clearly to respondents meant that the information we gathered would also be clear and actionable.
  • Secondary research: For this study our goal was to create a white paper that would provide insight into HTML5 trends and resonate with multiple audiences in the advertising industry. Once we completed data collection, we analyzed the results and conducted additional secondary research to validate the results and frame the whitepaper in a broader market context.

The Insight

Through our research we found four main obstacles for advertising professionals:

  1. Desktop’s continued prevalence leads to complacency: More than half of digital ad campaigns are designed specifically for desktop PCs.
  1. Too many options to choose from: Industry standards do not exist and the digital ad industry is fragmented, making the decision to stick with legacy platforms a strong factor.
  1. Insufficient client demand: Clients aren’t expressing enough interest in mobile advertising and ad networks aren’t providing enough validation metrics.
  1. Outsourced mobile production: Agencies are not investing in the resources and knowledge to support HTML5 ad development in-house due to the prevalence of desktop ads, use of legacy platforms and lack of client demand.