David Edeburn has spent a couple weeks working with GWD training and getting certified. David will now provide a deep dive into the strengths and weaknesses for the banner ad community.
Animating in quick mode won’t lend itself to professional level work however with some effort advanced mode animation works well enough to pass for very simple mobile ads. It’s certainly not the best animation tool but again probably good enough for simple ads.
The real benefits are saving time integrating the components and the event tracking. There’s a good amount of event tracking that can be added quickly for rich media ads automatically and it is relatively painless to create new custom events to track interactions within the unit, track video playback events, set up counters, timers, and utilize built in event tracking methods like report.manualClose(). David Edeburn is now certified in GWD Beta and has created several mobile expandable ads in the tool with relative ease. Being able to adjust browser compliance settings in the publish settings is a useful feature and a time saver compared to hand coding as well.
David is now working on developing custom components to be integrated into Google Web Designer Beta with the hopes of adding added value to ads he creates with the tool .
Having uploaded ads into DoubleClick David has not had any issues with events not firing which has been happening a lot with hardcoded banners. Doubleclick’s HTML5 QA system is now notorious for being buggy and countless hours are being spent creating by creatives all over the US on workarounds where there shouldn’t need to be. Perhaps this is why Google is dropping QA as a service for their DCM altogether?
Animation challenges persist in this software. Simple things such as duplicating animations, copying keyframes, copying timeline events or labels continue to limit this tool to simple animations. However Google has added timeline events which allow developers to create more complex interactive experiences for users albeit visually simplistic.
Much more documentation is needed on advanced functionality and training for GWD Beta so challenges abound. Simple things like adding a custom component into the system are lacking in documentation.
Creating ads for retina display is another challenge the GWB Beta team has some recommends but they’re a heavier development lift then they need to be at the moment. However it looks like Google’s Admob has a better solution that David Edeburn will be testing out in the near future. David will update the community soon.