• by Ken Liebeskind , May 7, 2001

Just last year, advertisers could only dream of creating rich media ads with animation and special effects, placing them anywhere on the Web and having the opportunity to have those ads accurately tracked. Today, the above process is a reality, says one company. It's called High Fidelity Animation and developers claim it is very different from Flash, Java, streaming video, and other standard rich media formats.

The company is San Francisco-based Onflow Corp. "High fidelity animation, previously only seen in Hollywood films and on broadcast television, is now available on the Web, even to Internet users with a 28.8 Kbps modem," says marketing manager Molly Drewes.

But the new format is more than rich media, because of the tracking capabilities that come with it. "The problem with the Internet today is that people don't know when impressions are served and that creates discrepancies in the reporting. We have client side tracking that provides very specific impression statistics. We can tell you that it was viewed, exactly what time and for how long," Drewes says.

Users log onto Onflow.com and sign up to author rich media content. They compose their own ad using Web-based authoring tools at no charge and can import files in a variety of formats including, .jpeg, .bmp, .tga , .gif or animated .gif with .swf import to be offered soon. The files created are element rich but small in size, averaging between 4K to 50K, which is much smaller than the typical animation file, which makes it viewable without long downloads by all Internet users regardless of connection speed.

Once the rich media ad is created, it is saved in the system. Users get an embed tag they use to place the ad anywhere on the Web, including DoubleClick and other third party ad serving companies or sites that sell their own ads.

To view an Onflow ad, Internet surfers need to download an Onflow player, which displays the rich media content in the surfer's browser. Drewes says there have been 10 million downloads of the player so far.

There is no charge to create a rich media ad. Onflow's customers pay a CPM rate for the ads once they're viewed.

Onflow has been focusing on player distribution, but is now starting to focus on advertising campaigns. To date, its rich media ads have run on Redherring.com, once for a Redherring promotion and another time for Informix, an advertiser on the Redherring site. Redherring created a rich media ad to promote the Herringtown part of its site. It sent the rich media ad in its newsletter, Catch of the Day, which invited recipients to download Onflow to see the rest of the ad, which was a minisite that promoted Herringtown.

- Ken Liebeskind may be reached at kenrunz@aol.com