In this section, you will learn how to create a Connected Stories campaign taking advantage of the platform's full potential and its features.
Create a Campaign
Different from any other platform, the campaign creation process doesn't start with randomly designing and assembling the creativities. it starts by breaking down the customer journey and defining the sequence of messages to be presented to the targeted audience at each state of the journey.
Once the journey and its stages have been defined, the creatives can assemble the units and associate them to a particular stage of the journey. This is what we call the Connected-Stories Approach.
The workflow is then defined into 4 stages: Planning, Setup, Delivery, Live.
1) Planning: Define the Customer Journey
Define the customer journey according to the target audience, the campaign objectives, the media placements and the products to be advertised.
Message sequencing is perhaps the single most important feature of Connected-Stories and you don't want to miss out on that.
Therefore, the first step we suggest for you to make is to define the sequence of messages that will compose your campaign. Having a clear idea of how you see the customer journey panning out will be helpful in order to define the actual creatives that will be part of the campaign and how these will be connected to one another (hence Connected-Stories).
To see how to setup a sequence see the Journey Designer section.
2) Setup: Create Connected Stories
Upload basic assets (videos, images, etc.) to Connected-Stories media library and then start creating the actual ad units according to the sequence setup at the conception stage. See the Stories section for more details
After uploading assets, you can begin the process of creating your stories.
The story creation process is divided into three main steps: Campaign, Format, Story.
Add a Campaign
This is the first piece needed to be setup. In each Campaign you'll be able to set up the formats and the number of stories needed for each format.
- Add Formats
Under a campaign, you may include as many formats as planned by the digital brief and the media plan. Connected-Stories has a large number of different formats (mobile, desktop, and native).
To see a complete list of the formats supported and how to set them up visit the Ad Formats section.
Add Stories
Stories are the creative materials customized to become dynamic ads. These are what the end-users will be seeing and interacting with.
To make the stories more dynamic, widgets can be added to them. You can create as many combinations of widgets you want based on how you have panned out your customer journey.
To see how to setup and edit a story visit the Stories section.
Storyboard
Each story will have their unique and individual flows. You may connect the elements into one full journey design by dynamically sequencing the parts you have included in the story editor. This step will dictate the message sequencing for your created stories.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The best thing to do after creating the storyboard is to review the initial sequence created in the Journey Designer at the start of the process. From here, you can adjust any discrepancy and finalize your connected stories flow. Once everything is set - you may now connect your stories.
3) Delivery: Ad Export
Generate ad tags and deliver them to any ad server and exchange to start trafficking your new Connected-Stories campaign.
Once your creative is finalized and ready to be trafficked all is left to do is exporting the stories.
Connected-Stories provides different exporting methods for its units:
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HTML5/JS Tag:
These kinds of exports allow to traffic the stories in a dynamic way. Here you will be able to leverage all the magic of Connected-Stories in terms of both widgets and message sequencing
VAST/VPAID Tags:
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MRAID Tag:
To learn more about generating ad tags see the Story Ad Tags section.
4) Live: Real-Time Optimization
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C-S Studio is a codeless environment designed for easily setting up any type of ad video creatives. Thanks to its intuitive interface you will able to set up all your stories faster and change them at any time.
C-S STUDIO STRUCTURE
C-S Studio is made up by two windows, one next to the other:
- the right side window only shows the video ad you have before you uploaded. It allows to play/pause and also to move the cursor along all the timeline so that you will easily see each ad frame in order to insert widget in any moment;
- the left side window shows the ad preview of the video ad and that's where you will have to put and move all the interactive widgets you decided to add and directly modify them on the screen.
On C-S Studio interactive widgets can be easily assembled on the video ad through more than 15 templates that will help you to create the most dynamic and engaging stories for your target audience.
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Do you want do give shape to your idea but you can't find the right widget template? Write to us and we'll be happy to help you suggesting and developing a new widget's template that will meet all of your needs! |
C-S STUDIO TIMELINE-BASED SYSTEM
On C-S Studio everything is built on timeline-based system so that you can decide when to trigger an event and eventually make it disappear at the right second.
An event can contain an unlimited amount of interactive widgets which will have the same timecode of all the other widgets in the whole event.
You can also not assign a specific timecode to an event which will be then triggered by another widget (see here how to do it).
In the image above you can see an example of how your events will look like: on the left you will see the timecode you've set to trigger that event and on the right the name you gave to a specific event.
C-S STUDIO PRECISION EDITING TOOL
Once setup, each widget can be placed anywhere on the video through a precision editing tool.
C-S Studio allows you to modify any of your widgets directly on the left screen: by moving the cursor you can place your widget anywhere on the video and can you resize it to make it bigger or smaller.
With C-S Studio you are also able to watch in real time how the video ad looks like as you move or resize the widgets. Infact, by clicking on the botton "Open preview", a new window will open on your browser showing in full-screen the interactive ad you have just set up, so that you can decide if it works well or if it needs some adjustments.
