Sprout grows its ad products with DoubleClick integration

San Francisco-based Sprout made a big splash when it launched two years ago with its easy tools for building applications in the Flash format. In the last few months, it has been refocusing on advertising, and with today’s just-announced integration with Google’s DoubleClick ad products, Marketing Director Roland Smart said the company has completed “the major parts of this pivot.”

The company’s first big announcement in this area came in April, when it revealed that its tools could be used to build interactive ads that run in both the Flash and HTML5 formats (an Alice in Wonderland ad built with Sprout is pictured above), depending on what the viewer’s Web browser supports. Now, Sprout is also helping with the distribution of those ads — it allows users to import ads into DoubleClick Studio, where the ads can be previewed, then pushed out to DoubleClick’s ad servers.

Previously, moving an ad from Sprout to an ad server could be “a pain,” Smart said. Now it can be accomplished by just clicking a button. As a comparison, Smart said building an ad using other Flash editors would take five to six hours (not counting the time it takes to create the actual images, videos, and other media), plus another 45 minutes to load into DoubleClick. With the company’s tools, it should take 15 minutes to build the ad in Sprout, then another five minutes to import into DoubleClick.

Sprout has changed course a few times now, Smart acknowledged. The new focus on ads seemed like the best fit for Sprout’s technologies, particularly with the application market getting crowded and with growing need for ads that work in different formats and can adjust to the varying screen sizes of different devices like mobile phones.

“If I can articulate the mood in the office, this just feels like this is finally the thing that we are really excited about,” Smart said.

He added that even though he now considers Sprout to have a “full-service” advertising product, there are more features coming down the line, including support for other ad servers.

Sprout launched at DEMO, the tech launchpad conference now coproduced by VentureBeat.