Atkins, the famous provider of low-carbohydrate diet products and services, has a uniquely interactive online site, with a host of features designed to support followers of the Atkins lifestyle, including recipe conversions, shopping lists and carbohydrate gram counters.

To take advantage of the uptick in weight loss resolutions at New Years, the company decided to launch an ad campaign to heighten awareness of the food products, nutritional supplements and information services available on Atkins.com. The company worked with media agency Mass Transit to design a targeted online campaign to generate brand awareness and drive online sales.

"We recommended rich media based on its improved performance over other ad formats," said Jason Hellor, CEO at Mass Transit. "Yet the time-sensitive nature of this campaign made it imperative that we find some logistical efficiencies in the workflow of creating, managing, and measuring the impact of the campaign. Bringing the campaign to market as soon as possible would capitalize on the New Years resolution theme, and save the client money."

That time-saver turned out to be DART Motif, from Macromedia and DoubleClick. Using Motif and the Flash Ad Kit, Mass Transit and Atkins were able to automate the entire ad trafficking and delivery process.

The campaign called for the creation of three floating ads featuring three Atkins Nutritionals products. Using the Flash Ad Kit, creative agency Digital Pulp – a Mass Transit partner -- was able to create multiple creative executions quickly by leveraging its baseline rich media template. It was also able to easily tag multiple events within the ad campaign for tracking.

"The jump pages contain many call-to-action elements, such as signing up for the newsletter and joining as a new member," said Susan Reiter, account director at Digital Pulp. "Our goal for the campaign was to increase awareness about the Atkins suite of products, so we tagged the call-to-action elements on the jump pages to measure sales and interest."

Since DART Motif provided a single environment for creating, delivering and reporting on the Atkins campaign, both Digital Pulp and Mass Transit could manage the campaign process internally, viewing a single report of the response rates, etc.

Plus, DART Motif helped them bridge the gap between ad creation and ad trafficking, dramatically reducing the time required to traffic the rich media campaign.

"At Mass Transit, trafficking an ad went from a three- to five-day process to being a one-day process," said Michelle Burnham, director of campaign management. "We don’t have to wait for days for fourth-party vendors to implement our DART tags and traffic rich media ads out to the sites. By eliminating the extra step we have more control over this process. Once we get the Motif file from Digital Pulp, it’s as easy as opening a .gif, creating a DART tag, and sending it out. The linking URL is pre-populated and you can preview the ad and make changes through the Double Click interface in minutes instead of sending it back to the creative team and waiting a day or two."

DART Motif’s one-stop reporting for both rich and non-rich media also ensures that Atkins and Mass Transit can evaluate exactly how well rich media ads perform in the overall media mix.

"Post activity and interaction tracking is streamlined to one set of numbers, a single set of reports and a consistent measuring methodology, so we can more accurately assess the performance of rich media ads," Burnham said. "We use this information to optimize campaigns. The less time we spend merging reports from 4th party vendors with ad serving reports, the more time we have to analyze and optimize our campaigns."

For the Atkins campaign, the numbers are telling. Rich media ads consistently performed twice as well as standard ads from both a response and branding perspective.

"DART Motif has enabled significant logistical efficiencies at every step of the rich media process," Heller said. "At the end of the day, everyone benefits."

To learn more about DART Motif, visit DoubleClick here.