• by Bill McCloskey , June 19, 2001

A colleague recently sent me an email chastising me for some of my recent (and ongoing) support of plug-in technologies. His email to me seemed to imply that my statement (made at a recent IAB conference) saying "plug-ins are no longer an issue for advertisers," was somehow misleading and not in keeping with my personal moral code of being just as tough on rich media as I was supportive of it. In his view, unless you are using Flash, Windows Media Player, or Real Player there is a big problem for advertisers using plug-in technologies and I was being ingenuous not to say so.

So, let's pick up the gauntlet and swing it around a bit.

First of all, to a certain degree when I speak about "plug-ins", I am mostly (in my mind) referring to my friend's big three: Flash, Windows Media, and Real. You see, I started out at a time when any "plug-in" was an anathema to agencies. The word itself scared people off. The notion that 100% of the possible viewing audience would be prevented from seeing their ad (or worse yet: FORCED to download a plug-in) was unacceptable. The idea that using a plug-in might make more people aware of their advertising message hadn't occurred to most people.

And it didn't matter what the distribution numbers were. In 1997, a VRML plug-in was distributed with every copy of Netscape and Internet Explorer - over 30 million units installed, and still we had the "plug-in" problem when it came to advertising. And yet when studies were done on the effectiveness of VRML advertising it showed that people who saw the VRML ads were more affluent, better educated, and more likely to buy on the Web, while the group who couldn't see the ads were more likely than not to save bits of soap to squeeze into a new bar and listen to 8-track tapes Pat Boone.

And so when I say, the plug-in issue is behind us - yesterday's news - in a certain sense I'm talking about the fear of plug-ins is behind us. The argument that a technology is plug-in-less is not as strong a selling point as it used to be.

The one thing everyone can agree on is that no one is going to download a plug-in to see an ad. Or can they? BMW seems to have no problem asking people to download the BMW player to view the Ang Lee BMW "commercial". But let's assume for a second you are not going to require a download before the banner runs. How effective are plug-in technologies that don't have Flash distribution metrics?

Let's take the Comet Cursor? Most plug-in technologies have a way of substituting a standard image in place of the plug-in based image if the plug-in is absent on the users machine. With the Comet Cursor you didn't even need to do that. If you didn't have the plug-in, a static banner image was displayed. If you did have the plug-in, the same image was displayed but this time your cursor had changed into something that reflected the banner message. Maybe it was a little animated "monster" for the movie "The Iron Giant", for example. Even though the overall reach of the Comet Cursor plug-in was relatively small (around 12 to 20% for most campaigns) the effect on overall click through numbers was significant. While the general population was clicking less than half of one percent, the Comet enabled folks where click-happy, clicking away at 7-8% which raised the overall campaign stats into a decent 1-2% CTR.

An interesting side benefit to plug-in technologies (one in which I'm surprised people haven't picked up on) is that the lack of mass distribution can create some interesting and powerful audience segmentation opportunities. People who have some of the more interesting plug-ins installed are usually more cutting-edge, more likely to be engaged with the technology, younger, more open to new experiences: why not reflect that in the creative. Like the old Little Orphan Annie decoder rings, why not create a message that only those users in the know can see? Why not use the lack of distribution to your advantage rather than seeing it as an obstacle in your way?

In the end, you just never know how fast a plug-in is going to take off. Onflow worked more that a year to get up to the magic "million installs" plateau. Two days later, they had 2 million. Two months later, they had 10 million installs.

And so I repeat. Plug-ins are not a problem. Plug-ins, as an issue, are yesterday's news.

- 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.