UPDATE: DoubleClick Launches DART Motif

DoubleClick today officially released the company's highly anticipated DART Motif rich media product. The integrated solution for creating, trafficking, deploying and reporting on rich media ads was created by integrating Macromedia Flash MX with DART ad management solutions, and promises to enable web publishers, advertisers and agencies to simplify and save time at every step of the rich media process.

And, according to Bill McCloskey, founder of rich media consultancy Emerging Interest, the release "may mark the beginning of the end for many of the 3rd party rich media vendors. Their fate will lie in how they respond to the Motif product."

The release is a result of the Macromedia/DoubleClick partnership formed in October and months of beta testing the product with several agencies. According to Doug Knopper, VP and GM of online advertising solutions at DoubleClick, DART Motif "addresses the fundamental challenges of rich media execution."

With DART Motif, designers can create rich media ads and package them into standard rich media ad formats for easy delivery. Both the ad designer and the traffickers can preview the ad in context on the target page and make changes on the fly before trafficking the ad to the site.

Experts agree that the tool itself is well crafted. It will enable agencies to make immediate adjustments without having to go back to the drawing board and regenerate the Flash files, which is something that has been a big culprit, McCLoskey said. "It will make rich media advertising as easy [to work with] as a .gif."

Jason Heller CEO of Mass Transit Interactive, who participated in the beta test of the Motif product, said, "We're really looking forward to this product, because it allowed clients who are wary of spending extra amounts of money on rich media to use it, and because it's something that we have more ability to control instead of relying on 3rd party providers. We don't have to match Eyeblaster data or Unicast data or some other provider data with our 3rd party ad server data.

Doug Wintz, VP digital media solutions at Lycos, Inc., agreed: "Motif is a natural extension of the ad serving solution that DoubleClick DART provides to us."

By using the product, the ad designer can specify the desired ad tracking and actions without the need to know about click tracking commands or scripting language. DART Motif actually converts the designer's calls into code that works with the ad serving platform. In addition, non-DART publishers can serve DART Motif ads on their site with the ability to pick up tags at a dedicated portal.

DART Motif also includes the same reporting metrics available in the DART products, including impressions and clicks, post-click and post-impression activities, unique users, Advanced Reports, and more. This centralized reporting function will allow advertisers to view results of rich media and non-rich media campaigns side-by-side. Multi-event reporting, including load movies, ad interaction time, and ad display time, will be available in November, and will also be integrated into DART. These metrics will help advertisers understand the brand impact of their rich media advertising as well as user behavior.

Will Motif totally replace existing rich media providers? Heller said it will take a while, but he did say that it's something that should be fairly easy for DoubleClick to convince publishers to use. "It's a real solution, not just a bell and whistle, and publishers are always willing to try something new especially if there is potential for more revenue, as there is in this case."

After seeing a demo of the platform, McCloskey called the solution, "the most significant product to come out since the floating ad," and predicted it will dramatically change the rich media landscape.

"This will be a powerhouse to compete against," McCloskey predicts, "We're probably going to see very dramatic consolidation in the space."

Existing rich media companies like Unicast, Eyeblaster and others, McCloskey says, have very strong relationships with the agencies, which is going to work in their favor, but DoubleClick is going to "certainly cut into their business dramatically. Established companies will be able to leverage the relationships they've built, but Motif will be a formidable competitor. "They'll need to respond with new features and enhancements."

To that end, Gal Trifon, CEO of Eyeblaster, said the industry should not be too quick to predict the demise of rich media companies that have been in the space for years and have gathered significant experience and technology / service capabilities for running rich media campaigns. "It is too early to comment on a product that was just released, but it is clear that the attempt is to address rich media implementation challenges that have been the focus of the Eyeblaster rich media platform since first introduced at the end of 2000. Eyeblaster certainly makes the process of running rich media easier for creative, media and publishers while maintaining the highest standard of creative capabilities with a set of standard rich media formats. Hundreds of agencies and thousands of websites worldwide use the Eyeblaster Rich Media Platform every day to create, traffic, serve, track and optimize rich media campaigns."

Trifon also said that being in the market for years, "Eyeblaster's level of understanding of the needs of rich media customers is continuously improving, and the importance of product capabilities, service and expertise as well as existing strong relationships should not be underestimated." Additionally, two significant upgrades of the Eyeblaster Rich Media Platform are scheduled to be released before the end of the year.

It will also be interesting to see how the other ad servers will respond, experts say. Atlas DMT is reportedly coming out with a similar solution in the upcoming weeks. "The good news is we're about to see two major product releases from the two major ad servers. That will dramatically increase the number of rich media ads in the marketplace," McCloskey said.

According to DoubleClick's Q1 2003 Ad Serving Trend Report, rich media continues to increase in usage, with 28%t of all ads served being rich media formats, compared to 17% in Q1 2002. Flash is the most common type of application used to create rich media ads, accounting for 12% of DoubleClick's total volume. In addition, rich media has proven to generate higher rates of post impression activity per impression (0.78% vs. 0.41% for non-rich media).

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