• by Mark Naples , May 1, 2003

Like most of you, I've been reading the news over the last couple of days from Unicast and Eyeblaster, about their "new" ad units. Eyeblaster has a 100K unit now, and Unicast created some buzz with their between pages unit which are really jumbo size Superstitial pop-ups. Does the Internet need bigger pop-ups or heavier banner ads? The more I read about these so-called "new" units, the more I keep thinking that this sort of sounds familiar. So, I thought I'd check on what some of the more strategic agencies and advertisers already have been doing for months.

Months before these recent announcements, James Hering and his folks at Temerlin McClain in Dallas were working with multiple Rich Media platforms to great effect, serving very similar sounding Rich Media ads long before they were offered as specific "products." Better still, Temerlin McClain was actually measuring the effects with hard data. If you ever saw their work for American Airlines, which featured a between the pages Shoshkele along with a Point•Roll campaign, you'd agree that there really is not a whole lot of news in these recent announcements.

The American Airlines ads heralded that company's new online check in feature, and it ran all over the Web beginning February 2. Hering was also experimenting with half page units and soon enough, the New York Times, which had run the American Airlines campaign, was also running half page ads.

The result? Temerlin McClain's interactive work has helped make American Airlines site one the best e-Commerce success stories online, with more than 8.3 million registered users. Was it the ad unit? Was it the media placement strategy? Was it the beautiful creative?

Or, was the juice behind this result the same as what's usually present in most effective advertising? A recognized brand leveraging compelling, dynamic creative that is well executed. Ever since Rich Media became widely available a few years ago, I thought that the main reason it would take over much Web advertising was its flexibility within these criteria. Good Rich Media can be as heavy or as light to deliver as necessary, with tagging built in to enable all kinds of metrics. Smart Rich Media companies also have to consider how to make it work for the user and the publisher. In my opinion, what is most important of all is the fact that an agency or advertiser working with the right Rich Media vendor can demand the sort of service that makes the ad appear when it is supposed to, be it on a certain landing spot within a banner or between pages.

When I read my New York Times Digital in the morning and see those half page units, I don't think of them as intrusive, I think of them as a far more appropriate palette for well-executed Rich Media. Funnily enough, examples of Rich Media that were strikingly similar to these "new" units appeared on the pages of NY Times Digital back in February. Already, it's been reported in these pages that some of the recent half page units on NY Times Digital and Boston.com were designed by agencies like Circle and McKinney and Silver in concert with print campaigns. Complementary, multi-media campaigns with an online component thought through from the start? Now THAT's interesting!

So, what's the news in what we've been reading this week?

I hope the news is that Rich Media technology vendors are becoming more responsive to their agency and publisher clients. But something tells me heavier ads and larger pop-ups is the wrong direction in meeting advertisers and publishers desired results. So this trend may not be so effective at the end of the day.

I'll believe that there's real news behind these recent announcements when I see a significant increase in their acceptance and reports from an execution of a notable campaign or two. Numbers don't lie. Have you noticed all the expanding banners on Yahoo lately? Something tells me that the numbers associated with them carry more news than these recent items.

Let's hope the real news in Rich Media resides in a new responsiveness to the people driving the campaigns - the agencies, advertisers and, yes, the sites. They deserve the kind of flexibility that the technology has enabled for a long time now. If you're an advertiser or agency type reading this, demand this kind of service from your Rich Media vendors. They're service providers, with solutions to your branding and Direct Response needs. Demand a full solution, not just a product mix.