Tag archives: rich media

Stupid games & banners to destroy

The New York Times has a great article by Sam Anderson about “Angry Bird, Farmville and other hyperaddictive Stupid Games“. It’s a great reading about the history and psychology of the games we love to hate. But the article also has an unexpected interactive twist: a little game on the top of the page that allows you to destroy all the advertising on the screen. Read more…

Online media: think rich!

Tagging it #interactivemonday, Kubus shared a very nice online media campaign from France to promote a new crime TV series called Braquo. Two special execution, one on Youtube, and one on MSN homepage that prove really impactful.

I know this kind of stuff might be quite expensive from a media buying point of view, but at this point I’m quite convinced that either you create online media that make the difference, or you just invest your money somewhere else. Let’s be brave, let’s be (very) rich (media)

Read more…

Your tweet, your Volkswagen

Nice to discover interesting content via Twitter. Yesterday, for example @_RGA posted about this rich media banner that profiles your tweets and gets back to you with the reccomendation of the ideal Volkswagen for you.

Read more…

Mercedes promotes the new R-Class with rich media

A car for rich people promote with rich media. Excuse my silly joke, but this is actually what MediaPost points out today talking about a new online campaign Mercedes is about to launch in the US to promote its R-Class luxury vehicle. The online agency which designed the ads is Critical Mass. They created a virtual avatar which enters the screen to delivered tailored sales pitch as a user clicks an ad. The innovative rich media will appear on Edmunds.com and ideally it will help generating a more engaging online experience. A micro-site will of course support the campaign. I must say I’m always a little bit skeptical when I see things moving around my monitor but, of course, in this case things are different since the avatar shows up only if the user clicks on the ad.

Online ads, let them float

According to Robert MacMillan of the Washington Post, users are not annoyed by floating ads (but he is). The journalist talked with a few publishers and advertisers who explained customers haven’t complained about this form of rich media moving around the screen. Pop-up and pop-unders are perceived much worser they said. I tend to think people hasn’t complained over floating ads just because they haven’t been asked the right question…

Smartphones and mobile advertising

According to the numbers recently released by Gartner, smartphones will represent one fifth of all mobile handset sales by 2008. 3G eventually appears to be around the corner, and we need to start thinking about the real opportunities on a mass market scale the new technology will provide us with. After the failures in the early stages of the mobile market, mobile advertising is about to come back but, of course, we need to take into account the lesson learned from past mistakes. Basically the marketing approach to mobile phones should be “push” not “pull” but, with the growth of WAP 2.0 portals and mobile HTML browsers, this concept will evolve. I see a near future of “light” contextual advertising, while I believe we still have to wait a couple of years for mobile rich media. Of course the technology is already there to support streaming media ads and now even Flash animations, but marketers need to remember the “pricing” issue. Given the current prices of 3G connections in Europe (recently I spent 15 Euros with Vodafone to download 300 Kb!!!) making the user pay to watch your ads is a crazy idea that could absolutely damage a brand. So while we wait for 3G to reach the mass market with carriers applying fair prices, SMS and partly MMS will still remain the best mobile marketing option.

McD: what’s the fruit buzz?

McDonald’s is running a six weeks online campaign to promote its new Fruit & Walnut Salad and target African-American women. ClickZ reports the creativity is by ImagineThat which together with McD’s multicultural marketing agency Burrell, developed a series of engaging rich media that include a quick and easy gaming mechanism. The first results are pretty good despite the rather intrusive format the food chain has decided to use. In particular, McD is using the United Virtualities’ Ooqa-Ooqa branded-browser takeover which replaces the page standard navigation with a McDonald’s themed navigation. This format is exclusively running on Bet.com however, once again the only supported browser is Internet Explorer so I cannot see how this technology works

Kellogg’s: a banner with an advergame inside

rmg:connect Australia has developed an interesting campaign for Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain. It’ a rich media ad with an advergame inside. As Ashadi Hopper, creative director at rmg:connect, explained me, they have transformed a standard banner ad placement, which would normally give an advertiser maybe 30 seconds of exposure on a page and a rather static engagement with their audience, into a rich entertainment platform that keeps the audience engaged with the brand for three to five minutes at a time. The game can also be played following this link while if you want to see the banner in action, visit Eyeblaster’s showcase. Too bad it doesn’t work if you have a Mac.

New campaign for LA Gear

davidandgoliath has created the “Discover Team” campaign for LA Gear. ClickZ reports the initiative targets women in their twenties, and consists of roadblock on Yahoo! Mail homepage, a new web site and a series of rich media ads.

The future is rich (media)

On Mediapost Joel Gehman (senior vice president of client services for Refinery) writes an interesting column about the role of rich media in online brand marketing. Nowadays banners still hold a relevant position in media planning, but in the near future they will be abandoned giving space to higher interactivity, which means rich media will take the lead. As Gehman sees it, rich media create a great brand impacts, banners are no longer able to deliver. On the other side, in the online advertising world, search no doubt works to provide immediate results, that’s why he suggests to spend online advertising budget on only two things: search and rich media. I tend to agree with Gehman, I just would like to add rich media will prove successful if we keep them “simple” in the sense we don’t make them too intrusive like, for example, floating ads are. Rich media can create excellent online experiences and deliver the brand messege, but if they become annoying than the negative effect affects the brand perception also.