How to Master Interactive Ad Creative: Content Collections

Welcome to our Interactive Storytelling series. Here, we’ll share our favorite strategies on how to turn static stories into interactive ad narratives. Missed the last one on quizzes? Read it here. 

For brands that need to advertise a larger suite of products or narratives, choosing the correct single topic to focus an ad on can be a challenge.

After all, choosing to highlight one topic makes the inadvertent choice to not focus on another topic. So what do you do?

You use a Content Collection – our solution for having your cake and eating it, too.

Content Collections are, effectively, a microsite in an ad unit. This allows storytellers to create multiple paths leading to multiple experiences all in service of your brand.

Here’s what benefits you can expect from a Content Collection:

For Advertisers: An Expanded Product Mix; a More Compelling Story

As stated above, offering a variety of paths for users can create several storytelling benefits. 

The first is, of course, showing more products in your portfolio. With each additional product, you have the opportunity to make your brand more user-friendly and more accessible to more people, thanks to more use cases and more choice. Plus, it will speak to the depth and breadth of your offerings.

But it’s not just a greater selection of products that can help advance brand storytelling goals. Content Collections can also offer deeper storytelling of your narrative.

Take the example here:

Here, the brand is using their paths to tell a farm-to-table story. One path highlights the small farms that supply Chipotle. But, we also have recipes, an ingredient exploration, and even user reviews. This deeper-dive gives the user a more complete picture of the brand’s process, thereby creating a sticky, impactful, transparent unit. 

But it’s not just advertisers that benefit from this kind of multipathed storytelling. Creative like this also establishes a powerful experience for users.

For Users: More Choice, More Personalization

There are countless ad campaigns that could benefit from single-topic advertising. And for those, you should absolutely use single-topic strategies.

For more complex brand stories, however, you’ll want to avoid single-topic advertising.Not every user wants the same products or services. Not every user wants to learn a brand’s story in the exact same way. The solution for this is personalization. And luckily, Content Collections specialize in user choice.

Knowing the benefits of Content Collections for advertisers (more products, deeper storytelling) and users (more personalization and transparency), we can start to dig into different kinds of Content Collections. Broadly speaking, Content Collections can be simple or complex. Here are examples of both:

Simple Content Collections

By definition, simpler examples of Content Collections will offer multiple paths for exploration. However, these paths are fairly straightforward. 

In the example above, a user is given three paths. Each path reveals imagery, copy, and a CTA. 

Content Collections have the ability to go more in depth, but this is a perfect means of offering personalization while still keeping the experience streamlined.

An execution like this would benefit from all the storytelling power of a Content Collection while still keeping production comparatively lean. In fact, this kind of Content Collection can be created on an expedited timeline. 

Complex Content Collections

Content Collections can also be more fully-featured. We can create an experience that truly mirrors a microsite, with each path representing a completely different interactive experience. In fact, it’s possible that any of our creative capabilities could live in a Content Collection at the same time.

In the example above, we’ve included samples of several Mattel games able to be played directly in-unit. Users aren’t just getting separate paths of information – they’re getting an entire array of diverse experiences.

Units like these tend to engage our users and encourage exploration while delivering one of the deepest, richest storytelling experiences we can offer. 

Users will interact with great content, full stop. So  for your next campaign, consider a Content Collection. By telling your brand story in a container that honors choice and gives users a greater degree of transparency, control, and even fun – you’ll be setting up your campaign for interactive success.

Interested in building a content collection ad for your brand? Click here to reach out and get started!