BANGKOK – Studio Magenta has announced the introduction of Immedium, a platform for creating and managing live banner ads – rich media Internet advertising with dynamically changing content.

Although the concept of live banners has been around for some time, Immedium is believed to be one of the first tools that empowers marketers with the ability to edit and update the content of banner ads on the fly, without the need for technical skills. The technology paves the way for a host of new advertising applications that exploit the powerful animation and multimedia capabilities of authoring tools such as Adobe® Flash® with dynamic content that reflects the marketing opportunities of the moment.

“The response we’ve received from everyone that has seen Immedium is outstanding,” said Dennis Cookson, managing director of Studio Magenta, a visual communications firm established in 2003 to serve clients in Asia and around the world. “When they see how easily and quickly they can update the content of rich media ads they begin to imagine campaigns that were previously unthinkable.”
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SAN FRANCISCO – Mission AdWorks (www.missionadworks.com) launches as the nation’s first socially responsible advertising network. Mission AdWorks connects publishers, bloggers and other site owners who are making a positive impact on the world to marketers who are looking for an engaged audience of consumers with which to develop a deeper affinity relationship that reflects their values.

By allowing publishers to aggregate their ad space together into thematic verticals – Environmental/Green Community, Social Enterprise Community, Youth Media & Community – Mission AdWorks gives advertisers a way to reach audiences that are difficult to identify and reach in a highly targeted manner on the open marketplace.

The national marketplace model benefits all parties involved, while doing meaningful good in the world and reaching the highly motivated, action oriented, influential, yet difficult to reach, socially-responsible audience, using behavioral social values to get as close to this target consumer as possible.
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Industry-First Research Provides Valuable Step for Supporting Online Video Advertising

LOS ANGELES–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Break Media, the Internet’s premier entertainment community for men, and Panache, the video advertising delivery-platform leader, today announced key findings from joint research which tested the effectiveness of four popular in-stream video advertising standard formats established by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) in May, 2008.
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Easy task, at a first sight: defining what exactly can be considered a ‘rich media ad‘. It is, of course… a ‘rich media ad’, as in a display ad taken one step further. Surely, this is not a definition. But it was pretty much all I could gather – from people who work in the online advertising industry and especially agencies.

It then became clear that not only there is no uniform, standardized approach to define rich media ads across all functions of the online advertising industry, but agencies in particular don’t seem too concerned with it: they’re happy to have received campaigns and ad creatives to fill media plans with, and there’s little interest as to what lies underneath.

But what are rich media ads anyway?

The simplest (and most inaccurate) definition I got came from, you guessed, an ad agency: “ads over 40 kB in size“. I smiled and nodded at this display of candor that can be translated in only one possible way – “if we have to pay extra ad serving fees, it’s rich media” – knowing that most ad serving companies would charge extras for creative files over 40 kB in size and these are usually (but not always, of course) rich media ads. I once had an advertiser sending me a 250 kB jpeg file to be trafficked as a banner ad, and surely there was no rich media involved.

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Metacafe has announced earlier today 12 new deals with video content providers – a move that will significantly enlarge their already impressive video inventory.

Metacafe specializes in short videos, precisely what works best for online consumers who don’t have the time or the patience to look into long form video content. Having said this, it becomes pretty obvious that the overall monetization opportunities for Metacafe have just diversified further, putting the company in a very enviable position.

Short videos are the easiest to monetize, and the most efficient given the higher CPM or CPE rates for:

- pre-rolls, mid-rolls and post-rolls;
- overlay ads;
- interactive video ads;
- companion ads.

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Mobile Marketing Forum, New York, June 11, 2008 – go2 Media™ (www.go2.com) a leading mobile media company, today announced the successful launch of animated WAP banner ads throughout its mobile content network. The animated banners are a series of images and text running on a 10-to-15 second long loop optimized to run across appropriate carriers and devices. go2 Media continues to pioneer new and innovative mobile marketing solutions by allowing advertisers and marketers to create industry-leading mobile advertising campaigns.

“As a top mobile on-deck content site, go2 Media is always looking for ways to enhance the experience for our audience,” said Rob Adler, CEO of go2 Media. “The animated banners are the most recent example of how we help advertisers to get noticed and also provide ‘eye-candy’ for our end-users.”

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New York, NY (May 8, 2008)—The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today announced the release of a set of Revised Ad Unit and Rich Media Creative Guidelines. These revised guidelines will help to eliminate points of friction in the online ad buying process while fostering continued innovation in the interactive advertising industry. The proposed guidelines will:

- Cover standard Web applications including e-mail, static and dynamic Web pages and address ad formats such as banners and buttons as well as transitional and various over-the-page units such as floating ads, page take-overs and tear-backs.
- Redefine rich media so that ads must be interactive aside from the ability to click-through in order to be categorized as rich media.
- Offer clear guidance on file weights and animation lengths for both rich and non-rich media online ads.

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