• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, October 3, 2005

The online ad industry has grown up a bit -- an observation I heard repeated throughout OMMA East and its press coverage. Panels of a few years back with names like "Search: What The Heck Is It?!" have been replaced with titles such as "Integrated Search Planning: How Organic, Sponsored and Paid Can Optimize All Media Spends," and so forth.

And such, er, coming of age seemed to go for rich media, too. I found one panel -- "Redefining What Makes Media 'Rich,'" moderated by eBrains' Seana Mulcahy -- particularly refreshing in it maturity. All panelists taking part seemed more confident of their roles, and surer of their places, within the broader industry. Not only did the panelists once and for all agree to squash all efforts to rename the ad niche, but they somehow collectively made peace with the harsh truth that people do not go online for the advertising.

It was actually Mitch Rose, vice president of marketing at PointRoll, who gave voice to the second realization, explaining that "We have to respect why [users] are on the page before we can serve effective advertising."

Another "rich" topic tossed around last week concerned clients' newfound understanding of RM as more than just a direct response tool. The consensus was that brand awareness campaigns are just as, if not more, relevant to RM as direct response -- a premise that DoubleClick supported with research it recently released.

A DoubleClick white paper, "Evolution of Rich Media Advertising," found that RM, including Flash and streaming ads, had a greater effect on advertisers' brand metrics than JPEG and GIF ads did. The paper cited a second-quarter Dynamic Logic study in which ad awareness increased 9 percentage points for rich media above the control group, compared with a 7.5 percentage point jump for GIF and JPEG ads. Also, aided brand awareness for the RM ads rose 4 percentage points, compared with 3.3 points for the JPEG and GIF ads.

Also in the study, message association rose 5.3 points for the RM ads compared with 4.7 points for others, and both brand favorability and purchase intent were 0.3 points higher for the "rich" ads.

Still, when the report further speculated that RM would account for over 50 percent of all online ad impressions in the next year, I thought they were getting a bit ahead of themselves. All the same, the news was encouraging.