Commentary

Up The Down Escalator

Last week I spoke at the IAB's Professional Development series in both New York and San Francisco. The event was moderated and organized by Doug Weaver of the Upstream Group and besides being a fun, informative event I was able to add to my repertoire two great one-liners (both written by Doug) that go under the category of "I wish I had said that." To wit:

1. - Click-through is the crack pipe of online advertising, and
2. - There are only two groups of people who refer to their customers as users: Web publishers and drug dealers.

Or something like that. Actually, I think he phrased both lines slightly better than I have, but you get the image. The Professional Development Series caters to media sellers, not buyers, so I got to really get the low down on the market from the seller side for a change. I felt a bit like Alice Through the Looking Glass.

Coming from the tech side of the business my experience with sites has always been that they are a lot like a Monkey Puzzle Tree: there is a way to scale them but it is going to be tricky and painful. But now it seems the world has reversed itself.

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Rather than be a roadblock to innovation and rich media adoption, they are embracing it. Many of the sellers came up after my presentation to tell me about which technologies they are looking at and which they find cool. And rather than worry about "user experience" they were bragging about all the wild stuff they've done on their front page to grab attention for advertisers.

But there was just one problem. Many of the agencies that were anxious to try new things in the good times, but were shunned by over protective Web publishers, have simply turned their backs. One sales person told me of having to pitch the agencies on creative ideas rather than the other way around; agencies that were so disinterested that even after the sale they couldn't be bothered to even write the copy: The sales people were asked to write the copy themselves.

If you say "online advertising doesn't work" enough times, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Right now, fear seems to be a big factor. Fear is not good for creativity. I know agencies, even interactive agencies that are afraid to offer new things to clients, and Lord help you if the technology fails even once. One failure can kill the chances of that technology being used again in some agencies. And that's not good.

Because, to be quite honest, anything really great is going to fail the first few times it's tried. That goes for rich media or any other emerging technology. There are going to be a few hang-ups going in: you should expect it. At this stage of the game, we need more experimentation, not less.

We are walking up the down escalator here. If you just plod ahead you get nowhere. If you stop, you go backwards. You have to charge up the damn thing to get to the next level.

At the end of the day, as I was headed to the cocktail party, I stopped by to chat with Robin Webster, the new CEO of the IAB. She hit me with a challenge: come up with a definition of rich media.

Now I've been asked this before, and have written about the difficulty many times in the past. I even have a whole section in my white paper explaining the forms and types of rich media in great detail. But this was not good enough for Robin. She wanted something short, short, short, and clear, clear, clear. And she struck me as a person who usually gets what she wants. So here is what I came up with:

Rich Media: a method of communication that incorporates animation, sound, video, and/or interactivity. It can be used either singularly or in combination with the following technologies: streaming media, vector graphics, and programming languages such as Java, Javascript, and DHTML. It is deployed via standard Web and Wireless applications including Email, Web Design, Banners, Buttons, and Interstitials.

Actually, I'm pretty happy with it. Covers all the bases in as succinct a form as I could possible do. But the thing I like most about it is the emphasis on communication. Rich Media is a form of communication. It's not about technology. It's about communicating an idea. You can't phone in your copy when it comes to rich media. You can't leave it to the media sellers to create your ideas. And, guess what? Mistakes are going to happen: it may not work perfectly the first time. Rich Media forces you to grab it by the horns, wrestle with it, to drag yourself up a descending escalator.

Hey, nobody said greatness comes easy.

- Bill McCloskey is Founder and CEO of Emerging Interest, an organization dedicated to educating the Internet advertising and marketing industry about rich media and other emerging technologies. He may be reached at bill@emerginginterest.com.

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