Behind the Scenes With Googleâ€™s New AdMob Campaign [PICS]

**Waqas** · September 2, 2011

When the Google mobile ads team was looking for the best way to promote the Google Search app for iPhone, the company turned to its in-house AdMob platform for help.

In the software industry, there is a term known as dogfooding — where a company uses its own products to achieve a certain task. In this case, Google worked with Grow Interactive to “eat its own dogfood” by creating a rich media mobile ad for the Google Search iPhone app. The goal of the campaign, dubbed “Uncover Your World,” is to show off Google Search app’s features in an interactive, fun way.

As you can see from the video, the ad is more like a mini mobile app, rather than an advertisement, using HTML5 elements like inline audio and video.

You can also unlock mini games in the ad, which take advantage of features like the microphone, built-in camera and tilt sensors.

Early reports indicate that users really enjoy the ad and interactive ad experience. Google tells us that the average time that users are spending with the ad is 1:30. That’s a significant amount of time for online mobile content in general, let alone an advertisement.

Behind the Scenes

Google and Grow Interactive documented the process of creating the ad in this behind-the-scenes video. We think using a 3D printer to create the models that were captured for the video and in the ad itself was an inspired — and very cool — approach.

Google also provided us with some behind-the-scenes photos of the creation process. It’s fascinating to see the work that went into creating the ad’s components. If anything, the easiest part of the whole process was using the AdMob platform to create the digital and interactive assets.