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Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

I just checked out the included templates. At least the first 20-30 are all ad templates, one of which is a full-screen mobile interstitial! That's the same element that just got an SEO finger wag from the Google Webmaster Central Blog[0].

_Just_ as the list of templates started getting interesting with some Youtube slider-thing integration, it came to an end. So yeah, this seems to be aimed at folks who need to build ads quickly and don't want to have to be HTML5 pros.

With that said, there's a "my templates" feature so maybe you can use it to maintain your Star Trek fan website, or business portfolio website, too. I'd just hesitate to recommend that in general, as my experience with GUI HTML5 builders has been that they aren't the best IDEs or text editors and I really quickly start to need one in order to be efficient.

[0] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easi...

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This tool was announced in 2013 by a different part of the company: https://doubleclick-advertisers.googleblog.com/2013/09/googl...

Wow, that link is a truly amazing advertiser buzzword salad; it even has an on-brand "up and to the right" graph. It makes me long for the days when disabling Flash and pop-ups got rid of most web annoyances.

I only clicked through due to your comment, I wanted to see what you were talking about. You weren't kidding! I think I handle marketing speak pretty okay, but this:

>Build beautiful HTML5 creative with ease.

creative what - repeated later, "However, even though the amount of mobile and tablet work is expected to increase, cross-screen creative can be difficult to adopt".

This just hurts so much. They don't want to call it "content" because ... it doesn't qualify as such? It's just -- "some creative."

If it were a noun instead of an adjective it would seem okay for me but this is just too marketing.

The whole site is a treasure, the apogee of marketers marketing to lesser marketers: "Today we’re excited to announce new DoubleClick precision marketing innovations..."

Including this: "a new JavaScript API in Google Chrome, called Intersection Observer, which provides viewability measurement for your mobile and desktop web placements without the need for Flash. Built directly into the Chrome Browser, Intersection Observer improves viewability coverage for all video and display formats across screens by solving technical challenges associated with mobile viewability measurement. It also provides faster browsing and less battery drain, improving the consumer experience."

I don't use a web browser built by an ad company, but what does this mean in human language?

"Viewability" is an ad industry metric of "did your ad actually appear on screen, or was it below the fold?"

It's actually pretty hard to detect except through indirect means, one of which was to use a flash object to monitor for framerate changes. On-screen objects would render with a higher framerate. Google seems to have built out an API so that you can just explicitly check.

For marketers, this is actually a big thing because it means a key success metric (did people actually see your ad?) can be measured more reliably.

You can disdain advertising or marketing in general and you'd have a point, but what you quoted is actually describing a well thought out solution to a common industry problem.

The negativity is really uncalled for. You could simply say "I don't understand, and haven't bothered to Google for 5 seconds what some of these confusing terms mean--can someone please clarify?"

This stuff is all geared at advertisers who want better tools for designing ads and landing pages, and publishers who want to create ad supported sites more easily. So they are using industry jargon that people in the space (like myself) will be familiar with. Yes it is "marketing to marketers" (not sure about the lesser remark), but that doesn't make it any less specific.

I'm not sure which specific page you are referencing, but this is all technical advertising jargon that means very specific things.

"Viewability" is a technical term referencing whether an impression is viewed by a user. As advertisers increasingly demand more transparency around ad inventory quality from publishers, viewability is a newer metric that the industry looks at. Here's a good starting point from the IAB for how they classify it [1].

Determining whether an ad has been in view has some technical challenges which you might be familiar with if you know much about front-end stuff. At a quick glance of your quote, this references improving the way a pages viewability of ads is measured on mobile by removing the need for Flash for sites to signal "hey, this ad impression is viewable (and thus more valuable)!" Flash bad, this good.

Here's some further reading[2] on the technical challenges from a company that handles inventory where these metrics are a factor.

Look, we get it, you don't like marketing. And yeah, my industry can lay it on thick sometimes, but this is about as poor an example of that as it gets.

[1] https://www.iab.com/guidelines/state-of-viewability-transact...

[2] http://productblog.appnexus.com/evolution-of-viewability-mea...

So since you're either a marketer or someone who works closely with them at least, I have a serious question. Why can't you guys be happy with simple, unintrusive text ads on websites? Why do you need to bombard people with autoplay video, audio, etc. and annoy them to death? I have never heard of a single consumer who enjoys this experience yet it's employed by everyone.

I'm no marketer but nobody want to read an ad for fun. You have to shove it onto their face. Even if you are angry, now you know about the product and the idea of buying it might get to you later on. I guess it is something along those lines.

See now I disagree with that, when it comes to for example, podcast ads, I don't mind them. They're usually read by the host of the podcast, it's done in a very clear "this is an ad, this company is helping us make this thing," it's not an attempt at trickery, it's not a lie, it's just there. And it's over and done with and I'm %10,000 more likely to follow up on one of those products (not to mention they're usually pretty relevant to the audience of whatever podcast).

Advertising itself is not a bad thing, it's a critical part of any capitalist society. I just don't understand how we got to the point where seemingly every ad is as annoying as it could possibly be, that every ad company is just in a race to the bottom of "how can we be as intrusive and unsubtle as possible."

There must be some kind of reward for doing this. Maybe there's a study about this kind of behaviour.

But I get what you're saying. I feel the same. But like I said, there must be a reason.

Nobody enjoys getting email spam, but it is still very popular.. why? Because it still works.

Marketers aren't dumb.. they wouldn't invest so heavily in this if it wasn't effective.

>Marketers aren't dumb.. they wouldn't invest so heavily in this if it wasn't effective.

So they're just unethical? Your logic can be used to justify a bunch of terrible things.

>Nobody enjoys getting raped, but it is still very popular.. why? Because it still works.

>Nobody enjoys getting scammed, but it is still very popular.. why? Because it still works.

>Nobody enjoys getting robbed, but it is still very popular.. why? Because it still works.

No.. this is an unreasonable argument. Whilst you might think garish adverts are unsavoury, I don't think you should compare it to illegal and terrible things such as rape.

To be fair let's make a distinction between spam (scattershot bullshit emails that nobody has ever asked for) and actual marketed targeted advertising, which both my employer do (with double opt-in) and I myself respond to pretty regularly. In fact it got so bad I had to unsub from a few amazon emails because this time of year I'd see some silly thing in their email and be like "oh my mom would like one of those" and I racked up like $400 on my credit card over a week.

Those are two different distinct forms of marketing, one of which I have no issue with, other than my impending financial ruin.

I also want to add page 13 of http://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/VAST4.0_Update... to your list. I had the pleasure of reading all of the VAST specs recently, and right now viewability is a mess. Often people will pay IAS for a flash client that supports viewability for VAST 2.0 because that's what most publishers support. Being able to do this without that extra request for a flash container that then later grabs your actual video xml is going to help a ton.

Given the current state of the web, are you sure a little negativity isn't called for?

I think the general trends we're seeing need to be course corrected, and that publishers by and large have dug their own graves.

That said, this is largely about decrapifying the web (getting rid of Flash is a good thing right?) and the parent also crapped all over a profession and industry while proving to be rather uninformed about it. So no, a little negativity isn't called for.

I think people like the poster above don't really understand what marketing is. It's essentially impossible to create something for other people and not involve marketing to get it out to people, even if you don't realize you're taking part in marketing activities.

What happens is people only associate advertising with marketing, which is really only one piece of it. Furthermore, they take one type of advertising, with data-hungry and sometimes intrusive online ads, and extrapolate their negative feelings towards that to ALL of marketing. Thus, anyone involved in marketing is a lesser person than them.

It's pretty clear what "viewability" means, and why people like you want it. It's also unclear to me that you should be allowed to have it. The reason most mail clients don't load remote content by default is to prevent spammers/marketers from getting "viewability" information. It's sort of a bummer that Google is apparently trying to push it into the HTML spec.

I normally use Firefox, but is there a way of blocking this on the occasions I use Chrome?

> The negativity is really uncalled for. You could simply say "I don't understand, and haven't bothered

Well... That didn't last long.

My guess: if one had to run it 100% JS it would drain viewers' batteries faster and slow down their browser more than if one uses that new native API. Not that I want to be somebody analyzed by that sw. I'm sticking with other browsers and keep blocking tracking js scripts.

View ability measures if an ad was actually viewable. An ad might load fine but the user doesn't scroll down the page far enough to see it. Accurate viewability would take that into consideration.

"Creative" is a well established commonly used term from the publidging and advertising worlds. Definition #2 at https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/creative#Noun

Your definition defines it as an uncountable noun (like bread - a slice of bread - a loaf of bread, not "give me two breads").

But below in this thread I asked for example usages and the person I asked said:

>"We have to work on the creatives to show to the client next week."

That does not match the definition you just linked.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/creative#Noun

it says "creatives" are people "some of the creative" (and the like) would be the things. It explicitly calls it uncountable in that definition. So does the wiktionary entry need expnasion, or was the example usage I received, wrong?

That's a philosophical question based on whether you hold a descriptive few of language or not.

"Creative" as a noun meaning content shown in a single advertisement with the plural of "creatives" is definitely in use in the places I've worked, which include a magazine/traditional publisher and a silicon valley tech company that has a large market share of the advertising industry.

thanks - I would say the wiktionary entry probably needs updating in that case.

> just too marketing

I suppose just an upvote would suffice, but I had to applaud you.

calling the actual ads 'creative' is common parlance in the display ad space. ( former Doubleclick employee )

Thanks for the clarification! I suppose I can see why they would call it something other than "ads" (which obviously has negative connotations.)

When reading the link I quoted from, I actually didn't realize it was talking about ads. I thought it was talking about any kind of content. I do wonder about something. I thought that Mobile platforms have a distinct advantage in displaying ads, in that most people (for example me) do not run any form of ad blocking on their mobile devices.

If this is true - and if the page a bit upthread that I'm talking about and quoted from is talking about ads - then when doesn't that page mention this advantage at all? (From the advertiser's perspective.)

> I can see why they would call it something other than "ads" (which obviously has negative connotations.)

No, that's wrong. "Creative" is professional jargon, it refers to the content of the ad when divorced from the medium or the delivery channel.

When I refer to an 'ad', I'm usually referring to the content. Whether I see it in a newspaper, on TV, or on a website, I call it an 'ad'. What are marketers referring to when they say 'ad'?

Would 'stuff' be an appropriate synonym?

To the extent that you can assign arbitrarily specific meaning to any word as long as others know to decode it, you could in theory find and replace "creative" with "stuff" in our language and records.

But otherwise "stuff" is an ambiguous term and "creative" is industry jargon.

Perhaps if you're a 19th Century tailor!?

I work in marketing, "creative" is used for pretty much any kind of ad/marketing product while in the production process. No negative about it. It's like "hed" or "lede" in the journalism world.

can you use it in a few very typical sentences, that aren't odd at all in your world?

"That creative hasn't been performing well, regardless of channel."

"Our creative review process is taking too long."

"Can you pull all the ads for that creative?"

"How good the creative is matters a lot more than how you deliver it."

(I haven't worked in ads since 2012, though, so my memory of the jargon may be off.)

Thanks. So what is the meaning of your third example? It's distinct from "Can you pull that creative"? In other words what is an "ad for a creative", as that is your third sentence?

The others are clear.

"Can you pull that creative?" would mean basically the same thing, and is probably what someone would say. I included "ads for" to try and clarify that the actual things you're taking down are the ads.

thanks

"We have to work on the creatives to show to the client next week."

would you be equally likely to utter,

"We have to work on the creatives to show to the client next week."

and

"We have to work on the ads to show to the client next week."

(in the way that a programmer could just as easily write, "I have to make some changes to the code" and "I have to make some changes to the program.")

? If, however, you're not equally likely, is it because the second one has some different meaning? What is that different meaning?

Every industry has its own jargon. This is the marketing industry's. Instead of trying to find meaning in it, just accept that this is how it's explained in the industry.

This is way less awful than KPIs, by the way.

Oh, I'm just asking whether you never say "ads" at all? (Just like a programmer wouldn't use the term, say, "Electronic computer program." Like a programmer wouldn't say to another programmer, "I just have to write a quick electronic computer program".) You guys didn't use "ads" at all? Or did you use them interchangeably?

The thing is, though, "creatives" don't always mean "ads" in this sector. "Creatives" can mean articles, or infographics, or illustrations. It basically draws attention to the fact that an "idea person" created the item. Limiting it to "ads" is a very narrow definition.

You're overthinking it. It's not akin to saying "electronic computer program"; it's akin to a programmer saying "code" as opposed to "software" or "an app." It's a building block, just as a piece of software often requires front-end and back-end development, the "ad" is in reference to both the creative element on its own and the mechanism that puts it there.

Oh, I thought where you wrote,

>I work in marketing, "creative" is used for pretty much any kind of ad/marketing product while in the production process.

that it was limited to ads. I didn't realize it would also be used for other things.

> the "ad" is in reference to both the creative element on its own and the mechanism that puts it there.

This is interesting, thanks. But what I was trying to get at, is to make sure you guys aren't confusing each other, are you careful to use 'creative' instead of 'ad' (since the latter can include the mechanism)? Or is this not a distinction you're careful about?

I'll give you an example - programmers are careful to say "binary" or "executable" if they want to talk about the program as compiled as opposed to as written (source code).

so is "creative" also something that you would use to be careful to distinguish the "creative element on its own" as opposed to the mechanism?

It sounds like your answer is yes, that's correct - I'd just like to get a confirmation.

Not OP but yes, the creative refers to something like a jpg or a video. The creative could be used in an ad, or a blog post, or an email, etc.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Thanks.

Am I allowed to jump in and say I find it hugely annoying? It's almost worse than people calling it "Social" instead of "Social Media".

It smacks of desperately wanting to be hip and cool.

You're misattributing motive.

It's just industry jargon that evolved over time. It's used because it compresses a key industry concept.

There's about as much motive to use the term "creative" to sound cool in advertising as there is to make "dongle" sound sexual in consumer electronics.

If it makes you feel any better just think of it as shorthand for 'creative asset'.

Anyway, it's a really mundane piece of jargon. It's like you're rolling your eyes at people who use 'access' as a verb.

Yes, even the TOS before downloading the package says:

Last modified: April 14, 2014

Here is a video from a UX Engineer on the Google Web Designer team, dated May 2016, which overviews new UI features. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8x6kENKG0M

Yeah, it is ad-centric but can be reconfigured.

One advantage over other HTML IDE's is that GWD's output is generally readable code, which can be extended, rather than obfuscated proprietary (adobe) bullcrap.

> That's the same element that just got an SEO finger wag

They are not going to wag themselves, so it only makes sense to include Google's ad template into Google's editor for creating Google Ads :)

(I guess half of this comment that's not a joke is it looks like internal tool gone public for mostly PR opportunity.)

Google encourages mobile full page ads through Adsense. Seriously, it's just called 'Page-level ads/Vignette ads' - "Mobile full-screen ads that appear between page loads on your site and can be easily dismissed by your users."[1]

Certainly don't want anyone else getting better ad positioning than Google, no sir. That's a penalty.

[1] https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6245304?hl=en

Reminds me of how the Google Mobile checker thing from way back would actually flag Google's home page has having too much crap stuffed in it.

Do as we say, not as we do, always a credible way to run a business.

The sub-text under 'USE TEMPLATE' is 'Use a pre-built ad template', to it's right there what this is ment to do.

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