Here’s a reality check for all those who said rich media was a fad - Nielsen//NetRatings today released a report that says traditional companies comprised nine out of the top 10 rich media advertisers
in Q1 2002.
According to data from the Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance service (newly acquired from Jupiter Media Metrix), rich media ads employed through Unicast, Enliven, Bluestreak and my personal favorite Eyeblaster, are gaining popularity among traditional advertisers. These high-profile ads, which float or walk across Web pages, cost more than embedded creatives,
such as banners and buttons, resulting in more selective placements for advertisers.
The top ten advertisers are: Virtumundo, Nextel, State Farm Insurance Company, Procter & Gamble, Verizon,
Coca-Cola, General Motors, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, U.S. Federal Government (I, for one, am glad to see our taxpayer dollars at work on this, aren’t you?) and Vivendi.
Charles Buchwalter, VP of
media research at NetRatings, said that since clutter continues to plague online advertising, advertisers and publishers “appear to be greeting the new rich media technologies as a breath of fresh
air, with a majority of traditional companies embracing the formats and including them in their media buying strategy."
Traditional companies are also making smarter and more targeted ad placements
with rich media technologies, AdRelevance found. The latest data on Eyeblaster ads show that 67% are "Highly Targeted" creatives, showing bias across multiple demographic categories. For example, a
highly targeted ad may skew towards women of a certain income and age bracket.
Seven percent of the ads were "Diversified" and showed little preference in any demographic category. In contrast,
nearly half of all embedded online ads reached a diversified audience, with only 30% reaching a highly targeted profile.
Buchwalter said the findings indicate that advertisers are finally paying
more money to target very specific demographics with an extremely large creative canvas, as opposed to bombing the Web with smaller branding banners and buttons."