Rich media is increasingly threatened by the rise of mobile platforms, and the continued reign of Facebook and its limited ad opportunities.
Yet nearly two-thirds of marketers --
64% -- expect investment in rich media online advertising campaigns to increase beyond that of standard banner ads in 2013, according to new research from Adform.
How is that
possible? For one, nearly half of marketers identified better integration of online display advertising with mobile as the lead driver for increased investment in online display marketing over the
next year.
According to Gustav Mellentin, CEO at Adform, what should worry rich media providers is industry fragmentation, and confusion among digital marketers with regard to
emerging ad standards and platform choices.
For instance, when presented with a list of seven common industry acronyms, a full third of marketers -- 33% -- surveyed cannot decipher
the term RTB (real-time bidding).
Adform also found that 39% of marketers do not recognize the term DSP (demand side platform); 47% do not understand the term SSP (supply side
platform); and only 13% can identify DCO (dynamic creative optimization). Marketers are also frustrated with the many separate platforms they use to run their campaigns, Mellentin found.
According to the survey, 42% of marketers are frustrated with using multiple platforms to run campaigns, while 40% would prefer to use a fully functioning single platform to run all
elements of their digital marketing campaigns.
Still, “the online display advertising market continues to grow strongly in the U.S., a trend which is only set to continue in
2013 with greater investment in rich media and better integration with mobile,” according to Mellentin.
Forrester Research recently predicted that online display ad spend in the
U.S. would reach $12.7 billion, this year, and would grow by 17% annually to be worth $28 billion by 2017.
According to the IAB, there's no evidence that rich media is attracting "greater investment". In fact, the IAB says that rich media ad spending in the first half of 2012 declined by a whopping 35%:
http://www.iab.net/media/file/IAB_Internet_Advertising_Revenue_Report_HY_2012.pdf