• by Nate Elliott , November 19, 2004

Does our industry owe something to rich media vendors? Pete Lerma posed that question last week, and while he didn't offer a final answer, I think he made his position pretty clear.

Pete said that rich media companies have "inspired us with innovation." Their work built this industry, he said, and if we don't reward rich media vendors with our business, they might never have a chance to develop "the next great, attention-getting platform."

I couldn't disagree more. While they're good at what they do, rich media firms like Eyeblaster and Pointroll have never been strong innovators. They're all second- or third-generation vendors. Most of them have never broken any meaningful new ground; they've simply copied the groundbreaking work of others.

Despite years of implied and explicit claims, neither Eyeblaster nor United Virtualities invented floating ads. The industry's first floating ads, back in 1998, used a free, open-source scripting language called DHTML. By the time Eyeblaster and United Virtualities came to market in 2000 and 2001, respectively, dozens of agencies and sites had successfully run DHTML floating ads.

All Eyeblaster and United Virtualities did was take those DHTML ads and build them in a more complex language called Java. The end result was floating ads that were more complicated and more expensive, and could be seen by fewer consumers. Innovation, indeed.

Pointroll can also thank others for inventing their business. A company called Narrative Communications pioneered interactive banners in 1996. Within a couple years, Narrative - by then known as Enliven - figured out how to make those banners expand, as did a new competitor called Bluestreak. While those companies were building banners in Java, MSN had developed their own expandable banner using DHTML.

When Pointroll was founded in 2000, our industry had already generated hundreds - perhaps thousands - of expandable banners. Pointroll's format may have been the best, but it wasn't significantly different from the other technologies, which had been around for years.

The only surviving rich media company that has developed something truly innovative is Unicast. Although interstitials - ads that play between Web pages - were nothing new when Unicast came to market in 1999, pre-cached interstitials were. By downloading the ad before displaying it, Unicast allowed advertisers to use much larger file sizes than they ever could before.

While there's no shame in taking another's idea and executing it well, it hardly makes the rich media vendors strong candidates to lead future innovation. And the recent history of these companies only proves the point.

Sure, each company has developed interesting bells and whistles for their products. Eyeblaster found a way to deliver different versions of their ads to users who'd already seen the creative. Pointroll started letting consumers e-mail themselves from banners. Unicast finally got their file sizes large enough to let advertisers use video.

But for the past several years, none of the big three rich media vendors has introduced a truly new product. All they've done is copy each other. Eyeblaster has copied Pointroll and Unicast ads, Unicast has copied Eyeblaster and Pointroll ads, and Pointroll has copied Eyeblaster ads. They're all just stealing from each other over and over, rather than developing anything.

This is not innovation. And this is certainly not a reason to give the vendors our business. The leading rich media vendors have never truly innovated, and it appears they never will. Pete, our industry doesn't owe these vendors anything.

Instead of choosing rich media vendors based on loyalty, or guilt, I think we should choose the vendors that offer the best products. And if we do, we'll probably end up right back where we started: with Eyeblaster, and Pointroll, and Unicast. They're not innovative, and they all still have problems to fix. But despite these shortcomings, and despite best efforts of competitors large and small, these three vendors offer the best rich media products on the market today. And that, not some mythical spirit of innovation, is why advertisers and agencies prefer them.