The underlying challenges of an online advertising campaign

With the current landscape of startups and products being launched everyday it has never been more difficult to attract the attention of your audience, the most effective trick is to put yourself in the shoes of your user base and ask yourself if the marketing material you are producing would spark your own interest.

The thing is as an entrepreneur you will face many challenges and exploring marketing solutions to promote your product is one of your top priorities. One of these marketing solution could be display advertising campaigns, and with little to no knowledge on this subject it could result in a waste of time, resources and money.

The output that matters: The banner

Creating banners is usually a tedious task that involves many back and forths between Founders (or Managers), Marketers & Designers.

As a seasoned product designer who has worked in various companies of different sizes and stages, the scenario below compiles most of the questions & challenges a company has to face when they launch an advertising campaign.

Someone in the team decides to launch a display advertising campaign, the following information is required:

1. What is the goal of the campaign ?
2. Who is the target of the campaign ?
3. Which acquisition channel should the focus be on ?
4. How to publish the campaign on the previously selected acquisition channel ?
5. What is the budget (creation + publishing) ?
6. Who will create the banners (design + wording + tech integration) ?
7. How long will it take to launch the campaign (from ideation to publication) ?

We strongly believe the creation phase (number 6 in the list above) is the most time-consuming step. When a business decides to launch an advertising campaign this is a real pain-point everyone has, no matter their skills and experience. As a result we decided to build a product called Abyssale.

The inception of Abyssale and how we are leveraging technology to improve the marketing process

Yassine and myself met in high school. That’s a long time ago. We started to build web-based products as a hobby and realised early the potential of internet based businesses. We both started our career at the bottom of the ladder, as a developer and a designer within Publicis Group. Publicis is one of the biggest European advertising corporation: there we learned the ropes of the industry and gained a lot of experience.

Time has passed and nowadays, most of the companies I’ve worked with loop me in when online advertising is discussed internally.

Below I’ve highlighted some of the most common type of topics discussed by companies who are trying to build marketing ad campaigns

Different roles, different issues:

• As an in-house designer I want to spend as little time as possible on creating ads, I am not passionate about it and I have never met anyone in my life who is. (It is usually seen as a tedious and uninspiring task.)
• On the other hand, if I were a marketer with no — or limited — design skills I would want to spend as little time and money possible on creating high quality banners. At the same time I’d want to test as a many campaigns messages and styles as possible.
• Finally, as a founder I would want to explore different type of acquisition channels but without having a marketing/design/technical expert on board, this task would become extremely complicated and time consuming. As you all know each channel has its own standards and rules.

By leveraging technology within our domain of expertise and adding automation virtually everywhere in the banner generation process, we can eliminate the tediousness and need for expert designers.

Of course, that is easier said than done. One of our biggest challenges will be modelling the design thinking and process into code.

Our focus building Abyssale

As founders, the main focus of what we want to build with the Abyssale platform is defined below. We call these our pillars:

Qualitative

• by ensuring high-end banner design quality (Branding fidelity / Striving for pixel perfect design / Performance)
• by guaranteeing a strong technical quality (Format / weight / pixel density)

Compliant

• by following Industry standards & best practices

Relevant

• by taking into account user choices & targets

Time-boxed

• by reducing the overall time spent on the creation phase by providing our users a smooth UX
• by speeding up the process for banner generation, leveraging clean and streamlined workflows, supported by Machine Learning and Data Mining.

By using Abyssale, you could vastly improve on the following aspects of your marketing campaigns:

• Explore design choices on a bigger scale
• A/B test more campaigns
• Validate multiple hypothesis regarding your product

Our engine could generate more banner choices in 60 seconds than a human designer could do in 1 day.

Ultimately, by streamlining these processes, you will reduce your operational costs for the creation of campaign banners. This means that you will be able to spend a larger chunk of your budget (both money and time) on strategy and other acquisition tasks.

What’s next ?

As I am writing this medium post, we are currently working on the core technical side of the platform, I am in the midst of doing user experience research to map a user’s journey (from the idea to generating a pixel-perfect display banner ad).

I would love to share and gather further feedback as soon as possible but we’re just not ready yet.

Integrating our potential users into our decision making process and the future evolutions of Abyssale is one of our core beliefs.

If you are interested by what we’re building here at Abyssale and wish to know more about the status of the product then please follow us on Twitter. If you are eager to help us build the future of online advertising apply to our alpha by visiting Abyssale

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TL;DR Abyssale is a machine learning advertising banner generation platform for founders, marketers and designers. Propulsed by Nitrografix a creative collective composed of multidisciplinary talented individuals whose common goal is to deliver exciting and innovative experiences.