• by Gavin O'Malley , October 5, 2005

Rich media, including flash and streaming ads, have a greater effect on advertisers' brand metrics than JPEG and GIF ads, according to a DoubleClick report released this week. DoubleClick considers rich media to be Web ad units based on technologies that are more complex than GIF and JPEG and simple animation.

The paper, "Evolution of Rich Media Advertising," cited a recent 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.

While the paper found that most industries devote at least a quarter of their Web display ad impressions to rich media, companies in the automotive and telecommunications industries dedicate over half of their impressions to rich media. The entertainment sector averaged just under half, with 49 percent of all impressions devoted to rich media.

The three industries that showed the greatest aversion to rich media included retail--which averaged just 12 percent--and the Web media and business-to-business sectors, each of which devoted 17 percent of online impressions to rich media.

However, when measuring by volume, Web media actually made the top three, with 34 billion impressions in 2004. Leading by volume was financial services, with 49 billion impressions--followed by telecommunications, with 44 billion rich media impressions last year.

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.

The report further speculated that RM would account for over 50 percent of all online ad impressions in the next year.

Flash dominates all other rich media formats, including Java and DHTML. For example, 97 percent of the rich media advertisements that Nielsen//NetRatings' AdRelevance system tracked throughout 2004 were based in Flash. Specialized rich media ad platforms--including DART Motif, PointRoll, and Eyeblaster--are based on Flash, but are reinforced by advertising-specific features such as streamlined ad design tools, over-the-page ad formats, ad serving, tracking, and reporting features.