The great big banner engine
Well-known sports broadcaster Eurosport needed a way to serve a vast array of banner campaigns to advertise their online player in relation to various sporting events taking place in 5 different countries, over the course of a year. Each campaign had its own brand colours and associated logos, with a matrix of match times, locations, teams or players and terms and conditions.
Key software and tools used
The ask
The work required a dynamic set-up with Google DoubleClick Studio and Google Sheets to control copy, images, frames and colours, as well as ad display dates and times, markets and languages. This set-up then needed to be hooked in to a template powerful enough to switch out hundreds of variables to serve the correct banner set to the correct market at the correct time.
Approach and result
Madnella formed part of a team that created the banner engine, setting up powerful, flexible Google Sheets that could take input from users in the team, and transform that input into the feed used by the template. Madnella was also involved in building the template JavaScript, HTML and CSS files to receive the feed and display the banners. The aim was to streamline the process as much as possible, while keeping input fields intuitive and ordered.
The banner engine ran successfully for a number of campaigns, and was expanded numerous times to incorporate more requirements from client. The resulting banners were robust and simple, but packed a mountain of flexibility, coping with text input ranging from a few words to long sentences, automatically resizing text, changing layout to accommodate images, dropping or adding frames where necessary, all while adhering to the main brand, and remaining well designed.
A powerful machine that produces and serves customisable banners on brand, within an hour.
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