How marketers can use real-time ads to get more out of existing investments

new ad technology work for your brand doesn't have to mean making new content. Alexis Cox shares how Google's Art, Copy & Code project applied real-time advances to existing content to help one sports sponsor gain a bigger audience for its best material.

Our collective experience is defined by moments: Did you see that goal? Did he really say that?

No one wants to miss the big moment—not fans, not brands. And brands should view that as an opportunity to make existing assets work harder.

Immediately taking those moments that brands already have access to, repackaging them using the latest technology, and serving them to the people who most want to see them is a great way to get more from an investment. Imagine the big game-winning catch you just missed served in an ad.

At Google, part of our goal is to use new technology to design a better ad experience, so we created a prototype of instantaneous replay ads. With these test ads, we wanted to help brands get their best content in front of more people. We guessed more viewers might choose to watch the ads, but we wondered whether the ads would actually lead to action and benefit the brand.

To test these ideas we partnered with Rogers Communications, which carries National Hockey League broadcasts throughout Canada. Building on existing programmatic ad technology, we created a prototype ad unit that pulled highlight clips that Rogers had uploaded to YouTube. We then automatically inserted Rogers' branding and served the spots to a targeted group of fans. For this test, the ads drove users to the Rogers NHL GameCentre LIVETM site, where a subscription provided access to any NHL game, even games outside fans' home viewing markets.