Commentary

The End of Rich Media

Is rich media still the savior of interactive marketing, or just more hype to be piled onto the bonfire of the dot-com meltdown? In March and April of 2001, Emerging Interest and MediaPost presented a comprehensive and definitive one-day conference dedicated to the examination of the rich media landscape. Billed as The Rich Media RoadShow, the conference traveled to three cities (New York, Boston, and San Francisco) during the course of one week. More than 900 people were exposed to the latest thinking and discussions on the state of rich media and the companies developing the technologies surrounding what seemed to be, for many, the potential savior of online advertising. In addition to top speakers, the conference included a “Rich Media Shoot-out” where more than a dozen technology vendors ran a high-stress gauntlet, strutting their stuff — in exactly seven minutes each — to an audience armed with whistles, “moo” toys, and Nerf guns pointed at their heads. And for a “take-away,” Emerging Interest created a 100-page white paper that provided side-by-side comparisons of all the major rich media vendors at that time. Now that a year has passed, MEDIA Magazine has asked me to look back over the past 12 months and to reflect on what has happened to the promise of rich media. Where are the companies today that faced that audience gauntlet a year ago? How have the issues and discussions surrounding rich media evolved? Is rich media still the savior of interactive marketing, or just more hype to be piled onto the bonfire of the dot-com meltdown? As you might imagine, the answer to these questions is neither simple nor straightforward. To start with, while many of the individual companies and technologies traditionally associated with rich media are doing fine and growing, I believe that the term rich media has outlived its usefulness and that the leading companies and technologies that have been traditionally included in this space have, themselves, outgrown the designation. INTRODUCING “IMT” In other words, as heretical as this might sound, I’m hereby declaring the end of rich media. Not because what we have been calling rich media has failed, but rather because of its success. Rich media as we have known it has evolved and, as a result, needs a new name to describe its new place on the evolutionary ladder. I suggest the term integrated marketing technologies, or IMTs.

Rich media has always been hard to define and has meant different things to different people. But more importantly, over the last year technologies such as video, audio, vector graphics (i.e., Flash), DHTML, and Java have become nearly meaningless apart from the serving, tracking, optimization, and targeting technologies that surround and support them. The ability to effectively utilize rich media technologies and measure their ability to increase brand metrics or enhance direct marketing response is integrally and increasingly tied to the deployment and delivery of the message. And this fundamental change has been one of the driving stories of the last year as companies continue to adapt, reposition, and consolidate themselves in the face of today’s marketing challenges. CONSOLIDATION OF AN INDUSTRY Bluestreak, which last year was staking a claim in the Java-based streaming video space, has transformed itself into a third-party ad server. By leveraging its experience serving rich media and making a strategic investment in acquiring the ad serving technology and customer base of AdKnowledge, Bluestreak is now focused on challenging the 800-pound ad serving gorilla, DoubleClick. Radical Communication, which last year was struggling (and losing the battle) for its very survival, has been reenergized and consolidated under the leadership of Mindarrow. Mindarrow has benefited from Radical’s strong technology base, while Radical has grown under Mindarrow’s leadership and management team. Unicast, the leader in rich media interstitial technology, has just acquired former rival Enliven, not for Enliven’s rich media capabilities but for its campaign management tools. And other companies not yet in acquisition mode are looking beyond their roots. Floating ad pioneer Eyeblaster, for instance, has been carefully repositioning itself as an enhanced advertising platform and ad management tool instead of a pure-play rich media DHTML tool. CHURN While some rich media vendors — and, for that matter, whole rich media niches — have disappeared since last year, dozens more have flowed into the space. In fact, as a sign of just how resilient the whole category has been, more rich media vendors exist today than when we did our shoot-out last spring.

Eyeblaster, which pretty much had the DHTML floating ad space to itself last year, has been joined by a number of strong competitors, including United Virtualities, with its Shoshkeles product, and Ad4Ever and its TopLayer methodology. Other competitors, such as Canada’s Intermezzia, are trying to stake their claim, and some publishers, most notably Yahoo!, have been developing their own DHTML ads for advertisers such as Pepsi and Ford.

At the same time, some rich media niches have dropped off the radar screen completely. The entire area of “cursor” advertising, which at one time boasted three major competitors (Comet Systems, CursorMate, and AdReady) has proved to be cursed, while client-side software packages that provided custom ad-supported links on Web pages, such as Flyswat and Gurunet, created no apparent linkage with customers.

STREAMIES At the Rich Media RoadShow, we predicted that streaming-based advertising still had a long ways to go, but that we would see movement in 2002 toward a more robust market for audio and video streaming ads. This prediction proved to be correct. The one ad that everyone was talking about late last year (and that forced traditional marketers to sit up and take notice) was the BMW film campaign developed by Fallon. Fallon showed that great creative and a “big idea” could be applied to the Web and attract some of the world’s most creative cinematic talent to streaming Web advertising. EyeWonder’s Java video started showing up on more and more websites, including the New York Times Digital pages. The FeedRoom, which integrates streaming advertising and marketing messages within an online newsroom format, remained up and running during the 9/11 crisis and has since seen its subscriber numbers increase exponentially. Lightningcast now controls the majority placement of in-stream ads (i.e., ads that appear within streaming content, such as online radio broadcasts), while Real Networks introduced RealOne and finally figured out a way to get people to pay for streaming content. MACROMEDIA FLASH But the biggest overall success has to be the general growth and acceptance of Macromedia Flash as an effective advertising technology. Every week since September the Emerging Interest newsletter has published the weekly Flash advertising impression numbers, and the growth is impressive. As you can see from the chart below, by April the weekly Flash impression numbers had increased fivefold, going from a little over 104,000 in early September to averaging over half a million by April. There are a number of factors to help explain this. For one, Flash technology has been proven to work, increasing both click-throughs and overall conversion numbers. For instance, Grey Direct recently reported a 400% increase in response rate for one of its clients’ email campaigns by using Flash over straight HTML. Other advertisers are reporting similar results using Flash in banners, interstitials, floating ads, big units, and other units. Flash has also gotten easier to serve and track. Last year, Macromedia introduced the Flash Tracking Kit, which facilitated the speed and ease it takes to deploy a Flash campaign over multiple sites and ad servers. A second version of the Tracking Kit is currently in the works to help advertisers track a multitude of events besides impressions and click-throughs. And since last year, the IAB has released its rich media guidelines, which have provided publishers the beginnings of a standard for all rich media ads, including Flash. BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME One of the newer IMT trends is the introduction of new tools and technologies that enable Web publishers themselves to offer rich media marketing solutions without having to rely on a specific vendor’s technologies. AdInterax, headquartered in upstate New York, has developed a toolset that allows publishers to develop their own unique ad solutions, including floating ads, games, and even surveys. The AdInterax solution also lets publishers automate split runs and includes very robust reporting features that can document the exact difference in response generated by a mix of various rich media elements in a single campaign. For it is not simply about animation, sound, or video anymore. It is about an integrated approach. It is about Interactive Marketing Technologies. With IMT, we move away from a Superstitial solution, an Eyeblaster solution, a Bluestreak solution, and we move toward a marketing solution. The question the advertiser needs to start asking is not “What technology should I be using?” but “What marketing objective am I trying to achieve?” With IMT, we can begin to answer those questions.

Bill McCloskey is Chairman and Founder of Emerging Interest, LLC.

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