Agencies Get Adroit

• by Susan Kuchinskas , October 1, 2007

Vonage was running 1 billion interactive impressions a month. So, when the VoIP telco changed its pricing, things got ugly.

That's when Judy Gern, Carat Fusion's manager on the account, decided there had to be a better way. Adroit is her answer to the woes of agency folk everywhere, letting advertisers swap out elements of the creative on the fly.

Designers can use any Flash tools they like to create the ads, but doing so requires a bit of a conceptual shift, admits Gern, now CEO of DesignBlox, the company that created Adroit. Designers need to treat each element of the ad - headline, body copy, image, etc. - as a separate element if it's to become swappable. The payoff, she says, is freedom from churning out iteration after iteration as marketers test ads' performance.

"Design is important, but it's the offer that's the driver of direct response," Gern says. "So, make a great design that lasts and realize that you'll be coming up with different headlines."

The Adroit hosted service sits between the creative production team and the ad server. After an ad is created, it's uploaded to Adroit, and delivered live from there to the ad server.

"Our platform was designed for laypeople - agency and advertiser end-users - to let them manipulate Flash files," Gern explains. But because it's a new kind of tool, exactly who should manage it will depend on the agency. Account managers, creatives and media executives all could take charge.

Adroit also enables testing of every component of an ad, as well as multivariate testing, in real time, using simple wizards. Says Gern, "This platform was developed with a direct marketing sensibility. This automates the process."

Now that's handy.