In Focus

Julie Ruvolo
Video Posted on April 09, 2008

Is rich media lost?

A recent flutter of rich media vendor announcements has left me and a lot of the industry largely underwhelmed.

Here's a quick play-by-play, followed by reasons why the rich media landscape is getting boring:

  • Burst Media / PointRoll: an ad network can now serve rich media ad units from a specific vendor.
  • YuMe / PointRoll: a video ad network can now serve rich media ad units from a specific vendor.
  • DoubleClick / Gigya: DoubleClick can now widgetize its rich media banners. Sounds like the Clearspring / PointRoll announcement -- last December.
  • Eyeblaster is busy IPOing.

So once upon a time, rich media was new. PointRoll was pioneering expandables, and Klipmart was making moves on the video front. Now rich media vendors have largely commoditized duplicated products.

The fact that they're now pursuing integration with video advertising is expected, and the fact that they're widgetizing their banners is only interesting to the extent that marketers and agencies can make creative that a user would even want to grab and share. In fact, in a paradigm where two clicks in a hundred are considered exemplary, what smaller fraction is going to want to save the ad and take it with them?

But all hope is not lost for rich media. In fact, there are four things that could bring sexy back to rich media, as well as some encouraging signs that it's already on its way to success.

Author notes: Julie Ruvolo is director of business development at DivX.

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Comments

Bart Pudwinkle
Bart Pudwinkle April 11, 2008 at 9:12 AM

Rich Media has come a long way, but there's still plenty of innovation happening. When you think of it as a website within an ad unit, you can imagine that we're still in the early days of the cycle.Also, I'm pretty sure that PointRoll was doing live video over a year ago. - BP

Tom Kasperski
Tom Kasperski April 10, 2008 at 10:28 AM

Agencies better start making creative a user would want to grab and share!

Vidar Brekke
Vidar Brekke April 9, 2008 at 1:56 PM

Great article and I agree with some of the assertions regarding the lack of meaningful and exciting new rich media innovations.However, there are notable developments taking place under the radar that hold great promise for new, mutually beneficial ad network and rich media vendor partnership. Take look at these articles from MediaPost, Brandweek and Mediaweek regarding Linkstorm's (yes, I work for the company) rich media format for a clue: http://www.linkstorms.com/aboutus/news/"No consumer in the world is looking to interact with the next ad format" – you say? Well, at least not until the new ad format is designed with users, not advertisers, in mind. This is what we did, and we were able to offload some of the behavioral targeting to the user, rather than the network, in the process. That's relevance, I tell you. As far as embracing banners, rich media and widgets, we did that with Cisco almost two years ago. See example here: http://www.linkstorms.com/clientresults/liveexamples/cisco_video/ The menus that become available once you've interacted with the ad are capable of serving, dynamic, real-time content just like a widget. Since this early implementation of our ad format for Cisco, our technology has become even more sophisticated and generating CTRs that are more than 5X (not 5% !) greater than our client's previous campaigns. Finally, in contrast to many creative directors rich media vendors, we don't think that the holy grail of rich media advertising is more immersive ads. Counter to this trend, we try to optimize our ads to not replace the click destination, but be an effective conduit for getting the customer away from the ad and into the destination where the advertiser fully controls the environment.