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Archives for May 2008

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Rich Media Ads – Advantages & Disadvantages

As discussed in Types of Online Advertising, rich media ads with which viewers can interact and may contain animation, audio and video. Rich media ads can be powerful way to convey your message, but these types of ads have some advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

  • Communicate more information – through different types of media (audio, video, interaction). Rich media ads can have video, audio, animation and even small applications or games.
  • Collect more information – either by programming in more sophisticated analytics or simply by asking for information.
  • More clicks – As annoying as these ads are, they are more likely to be clicked on because they catch people’s attention (please follow IAB guidelines), at least during the first week or so.
  • Powerful branding – Even if the ad isn’t clicked on, viewers are still more likely to see and remember the ad than traditional display advertising.

Disadvantages

  • May slow down a website – These ads tend to be larger in file size, which takes longer to download. Even with faster Internet connections being more prevalent, you should be aware of your audience and how many are on slower connections. Even with faster Internet connections, an overly large file or many rich media ads can still slow down a website. If your website is too slow, people will just go elsewhere.
  • May annoy – Since these ads tend to be more visible to viewers, they also can quickly become more annoying. So stick with the IAB guidelines and place ads for short time periods (no longer than a month) to maximize the effectiveness of the ad.
  • More expensive – They are more difficult to create and require a higher skillset. These types of ads are usually more expensive to place on a website as well (because of the larger file size and annoyance factor).
  • May be blocked – Although most people have the software installed necessary to view these ads, it is fairly easy to turn off this option in most browsers and in some ad blocking software. However, as more websites use the same technology to increase their interaction and functionality, viewers are less likely to block the ads.

If you are aware of these advantages and disadvantages, you can make an informed decision about purchasing these types of ads (or allowing them to be displayed on your website or blog).

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Adobe Air – Finding its niche

Yes, it was called Apollo at one time. Considering how many people re-reference AIR as Apollo in conversation, Adobe should stick with their first marketing idea in the future.

Adobe AIR is the new runtime desktop environment that has the kids in Silicon Valley all excited. Here are some sample apps for reference. According to Mark Blair, Adobe’s Pacific technical director, the idea behind AIR is this: online apps offline, platform independent, everywhere

It makes some sense, since so much development effort is being put into online applications, that you be able to tap into those apps on the desktop. In this way, AIR applications become non-browser dependent interfaces to big online applications like eBay, Amazon and others. Google and Microsoft are both thinking along the same lines (though at entirely different levels) with Google Gears and Silverlight. Gears is a low level persistence layer that syncs your online gmail, Calender [As noted in the comments, I should have said Reader and Docs ~aaron] and others with offline surrogates. Silverlight is aiming more directly at Adobe Flash/Flex and has only recently made noise about a desktop controls component. This late game hesitation on the part of Microsoft is understandable given their already commanding position on the desktop with .Net Really, for my money AIR’s largest technological competitor is JavaFX. Both are platform independent, VM based technologies. Until Microsoft’s Silverlight 2.0 comes calling, this space is Adobe’s to loose. Adobe has both a head start over Sun and a laser beam focus on their product’s polish which Sun typically lacks. If you have a web application and your customers are demanding UI options beyond the browser, take a look at AIR

Interesting technology notes, AIR uses WebKit, SQLite and Tamarin for its web rendering, data storage and ActionScript Virtual Machine respectively. WebKit is the renderer used by Apple’s Safari and native to the iPhone. Tamarin is a very fast ECMAscript VM that supports full runtime error reporting, built-in debugging, and binary socket support. It was donated to Mozilla by Adobe and will be used in SpiderMonkey to speed up its JavaScript support.

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Types of Online Advertising

Advertising online can increase your brand awareness and promote a product/service. Online advertising has a major advantage over other types of advertising (tv, radio, print) because it is very easy to measure the effectiveness of online campaigns. In a series of posts, I’ll discuss the different types of advertising, their advantages and disadvantages, and how to measure their effectiveness.

There are 3 Main Types of Ads:

  • Rich Media: The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has defined these as “advertisements with which users can interact” and can include video, sound, animation. Ads which just animate but don’t have any interaction are just display ads (see below). Ads should follow IAB guidelines to maximize impact without being overly annoying (which has the opposite effect from what you want). There are many types of rich media ads, including:
    • peel-back
    • floating
    • expanding
    • transitional (interstitial, introstitial, exterstitial)
    • video
    • popup/popunder
  • Display Ads: These ads combine text, images, and animation (but are not interactive – those are rich media – see above) to convey a message. Display ads mostly differ in sizes (see IAB for Ad Size Guidelines). Here are some of the most popular sizes:
    • leaderboard (728 x 90 pixels)
    • skyscraper (120 x 600 pixels or 160 x 600 pixels for wide skyscraper)
    • banner (468 x 60 pixels)
    • half-page (300 x 600 pixels)
    • square button (or tile) (125 x 125 pixels)
    • medium rectangle (300 x 250 pixels)
  • Text Ads: Text ads are typically just that, text. These ads typically are cheaper, but have the added bonus of usually being searchable by search engines and are less-ignored by readers than some other types of ads. Some of the more common types of text ads:
    • link ads
    • contextual ads
    • search engine marketing ads (pay per click – ex. Google Adwords)
    • online directories

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