• by Tom Hespos , August 8, 2006

Pigeonholed. That's how I'd describe prevailing attitudes toward rich-media creative at a lot of the agencies and publishing companies I've been speaking to recently.

Underscore was hired by another agency recently to author a "state of the state" presentation on rich media. Most of the background information we needed for the piece was already in house; we just had to pull it all together in one document. We also talked to industry colleagues informally about how they use rich media and paraphrased a few of the comments throughout the presentation.

One thing that was coming through loud and clear was the idea that certain formats were associated with certain third-party vendors. In other words, to some, a floating ad was an Eyeblaster and nothing else. Another idea we heard was the notion that a lot of these formats were standardized in terms of the experience they delivered. To elaborate further, in a lot of instances, "online video" meant 30-second preroll (and nothing else) to quite a few of the people I spoke to.

I'm not going to rail against the first idea. If you've read my column before, you know how I feel about the persistent and false belief that certain types of rich-media ads have to be executed through third-party vendors.

But I will challenge the expectation that formats are rigid and unchanging in terms of user experience.

One of the strengths of rich media is that, while a lot of formats are standardized, rich-media assets are simply a palette that a talented designer can use to create a unique creative piece that addresses the communication tasks at hand. There's no reason why an expandable banner can't contain video assets or a floating ad can't have data capture functionality. Yet, I get the sense that this isn't the perception of a number of agencies and publishers in the space. To many of them, an expandable banner is a Point.Roll Fatboy--good for only certain types of applications and for delivering a certain type of user experience.

It's almost as if a lot of people think of rich media as a set of definable executions, rather than as a creative platform.

We hear a lot these days about a lack of creativity within our industry. Perhaps a part of the problem is that we limit our creativity by thinking rich media must adhere to a strict set of guidelines. While it's great to have standard specs, we shouldn't limit our thinking. Rich-media formats should be platforms from which we can launch the functionality and media types we want to feature in our ads. They shouldn't be formats that can support only one type of standard functionality.