• by Masha Geller , July 10, 2003

As DoubleClick and Macromedia get ready to officially announce the highly anticipated details of their relationship next week, the rich media industry is staying away from speculation on what the partnership could mean to the industry. Instead they're talking about FatBoy.

Arguably the most word of mouth attention is currently being devoted to PointRoll, one of the leading rich media solution providers, which launched an advertising campaign recently that features some of the most recognized luminaries of the online advertising industry endorsing the company's FatBoy ad format.

The campaign is the company's "coming out party," as CEO and founder Jules Gardner put it, even though PointRoll has been in existence since the dot-com crash and profitable enough to be able to pay for the current ad campaign out of cash flow, according to Gardner.

Since its inception, PointRoll has worked with all the major studios this summer for their movie launches. Paramount, Universal, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros, and others have all selected them to handle their interactive rich media for summer movie launches, with six different movie ads running currently.

In terms of automotive, this company has handled interactive advertising for most the major car companies except Mazarati and Rolls Royce in the past year - ads for Chrysler, GM, Ford, Mazda, Jeep, Nissan, Toyota, Lexus, Mercedes, Hyundai, Fiat, Jaguar, Infinity, Lincoln/Mercury and others.

Additionally, most of the major brands that have advertised online have advertised with PointRoll in the past six months. They've worked with Coke and Pepsi, American Express and Visa, Avis and Hertz, Nike and Adidas.

All of the above could have something to do with the fact that PointRoll's technology has caught the eye of the three leading portals - Yahoo!, MSN and AOL. In the last few months, PointRoll signed deals with Yahoo! and MSN in which that both publishers are providing the PointRoll FatBoy as a no additional charge upgrade to qualifying advertisers. The publishers actually pay PointRoll the difference while their advertising clients garner the benefits of using the format.

A source very close to the company says a very similar deal with AOL deal is almost signed, which means that PointRoll will soon have the three top portals locked into using its services and thus have access to 85% of all Web traffic.

PointRoll is the most expensive rich media out there, Gardner admitted, citing that PointRolls hover around the $5 CPM mark, but explained that there is "a lot more cost associated with making a rich media ad run properly."

Gardner declined to speak for the networks on why they're willing to invest in PointRoll, but explained their decision to offer the FatBoy to their advertisers as, "it costs money to spend money. They wanted their advertisers to be satisfied."

And satisfied they seem to be. Michael Siegenthaler, Group Marketing Manager at MSN, said PointRoll "has been one of the most popular rich media solutions on MSN. We look forward to continuing to work with them with current products and as new products are rolled out that create rich media solutions that generate interactivity between consumers and brands."

David Riemer, Yahoo's VP of Marketing Solutions, said, "The main reason we're working with PointRoll is that there is certainly a lot of demand for their solution. PointRoll is clearly getting a lot of new customers involved."

Yahoo! is one of the few companies clearly committed to the rich media space, Riemer says, adding that the portal does limit its involvement and investment to only 4 rich media providers that the company thinks are "really gaining traction" - Eyeblaster, Eyewonder, PointRoll and Unicast. "Anything we can do to streamline some of the operational aspects of rich media, we'll do," Riemer says.

Is it worth the investment? "Our customers are really happy with our rich media partners," says Riemer, and "If they're happy, we're happy."

PointRoll is the only partner, however, that actually gets a check from Yahoo, but Riemer says, "We have different relationships with all our partners and simply by virtue of having a relationship with these partners, we're investing in them," he explained, citing time and effort involved on the part of Yahoo! in making these formats available to its advertisers.