Advertising technology firm DoubleClick Monday unveiled a new platform that allows marketers to serve rich media ads into flash-only Web sites--which are becoming increasingly popular with gaming and
entertainment publishers.
Ari Paparo, vp of rich media product management for DoubleClick, said the company developed the product in response to the difficulties of serving rich
media ads in Flash. "We kept hearing from publishers that they'd be building these cool environments and then have to figure out how to serve ads into it," said Paparo. He added that publishers in
this situation tended to resort to "hacky workarounds," such as "floating" ads, which sat on top of the content, but weren't actually integrated with the page.
The new product, DART Motif for
Flash-in-Flash, allows ads that interact with the content, such as a rich media unit that pauses video content on the page while it runs, Paparo said. In the past, he said, DoubleClick's ad platform,
DART, focused on pages built in HTML environments.
The new service has been in beta testing since January with four DoubleClick clients, including iVillage and Napster.