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.”

Immedium supports both manual updating of banner ad content using nothing more than a standard browser, and automated updating whereby ads are linked to an online database or RSS feed. “Distributing a banner ad with content driven by your database is the ultimate marketing tool,” said Cookson. “It’s maintenance-free, it’s always up to date, and it can run indefinitely, promoting any profile of your inventory.”

Examples of applications for Immedium include the promotion of last-minute flight bookings, hotel rooms, and other perishable products, advertisement of job vacancies, properties for sale, financial rates & offers, event countdowns, concert booking availability, online betting, and sports results. The platform includes metrics for measurement of ad & campaign performance, and being UnicodeTM compliant, supports ads in any language.

For information on using or licensing Immedium, visit www.immedium.net.

About Studio Magenta

Studio Magenta is a privately held Thai company serving a global market with customers in Asia, USA, and Europe. Providing advertising and marketing services for both print & digital media, Studio Magenta combines visual communications with innovative design and software skills to build new brands and help grow existing businesses.

Note: Adobe and Flash are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and other countries.

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.

Mission AdWorks has partnered with CPM Advisors (www.cpmadvisors.com), a technology company that manages, optimizes and enhances advertising campaigns for online advertisers, and Chapter Three (www.chapterthree.com), an open-source web design and development firm with an interest in social change, to harness their expertise to create a robust value proposition for both advertisers and publishers alike.

“We’ve gotten a great initial reception from partners, advertisers and publishers,” said Michael Clauss, partner in Mission Adworks. “They recognize that Mission AdWorks is differentiated by its mission of doing good, and brings significant advantages by creating highly targeted thematic verticals without sacrificing scale. Most advertisers and publishers want to be associated with doing good, while still making money.”

About Mission AdWorks:

Mission AdWorks is a social advertising marketplace that connects logical groupings of website publishers with marketers that are socially conscious and responsible. The company enables brands and advertisers to simply and efficiently reach the highly motivated, action-oriented, influential, yet difficult to reach, socially-responsible audiences, using behavioral social values to get as close to this target consumer as possible. The company’s management system offers: media delivered from its state of the art ad-serving platform; primary focus on CPM, but capacity for CPC, CPL & CPA campaigns; multiple ad formats including basic image, animation & full rich media; comprehensive reporting and technical support to help maximize campaign performance; multiple channels of niche communities. www.missionadworks.com.

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.

Leading brands, including Honda and T-Mobile, participated in the study by running campaigns run-of-site on Break.com over an 11 week period, which concluded on August 2, 2008. Each campaign used the four IAB standardized ad units: linear non-interactive (pre-roll), linear interactive (interactive pre-roll), non-linear non-overlay invitation ad (non-overlay ad) and non-linear overlay (overlay ad). The ads ran against short-form professional, semi-professional and user-generated content on Break.com with Panache providing the ad delivery and back-end reporting technology to test user interaction and engagement levels with each ad format.

“The standardization of video ad formats by the IAB was a critical first step in streamlining media buying, planning and creative processes across the digital video medium,” said Keith Richman, CEO of Break Media. “Our research was a result of our desire to provide data about the effectiveness of those new standards to our clients and partners, and to lay a foundation for future research initiatives to build and expand upon.”

Key Findings

Break Media and Panache were able to mine the data for trends and insights into consumer behavior and online engagement using the various ad formats.

Findings showed:
– Overall results demonstrate the high engagement levels of tested ad units and that marketing objectives should drive creative development
– Pre-roll offers a strong call to action (click-thru rates averaged 10%); Non-Overlays’ strength appears to be in building brand awareness (78% viewed the ad for more than 15 seconds, a majority of the time)
– Pre-roll showed surprisingly high engagement with incredibly high click-thru rates when interacting with a targeted audience
– Completion rates for both 15 second pre-roll and interactive pre-roll averaged 87%
– Pre-roll click-thru rate for the 15 second spot was close to 10%
– Interactive pre-roll click-thru rate for the 15 second spot ranged between 11% higher and 35% higher than non interactive pre-roll depending on the nature of the call to action
– The overlay ad yielded high exposure and overall engagement
– 77% viewed campaigns with the overlay ad for at least 15 seconds and click-thru rates were five times industry averages for standard in-page media
– Media-rich creative with bold colors and animation resulted in increased click-thru rates
– Click-thru rates almost tripled for the non-overlay ads when using brighter, vibrant colors (.045 vs. 0.13%)
– When using interactive pre-roll ads, having the entire ad clickable appeared to impact call to action
– Click-thru rates were four times as high when the entire ad was clickable vs. just the call to action.

“For the in-stream advertising market to evolve, the efficacy of ad formats—whether IAB-standard or new emerging formats—needs to be understood in order for our industry to scale,” said Steve Robinson, CEO of Panache. “This research begins to fill the knowledge gap between the formation of standards and the prophetic future of an efficient and scalable online advertising industry.”

“This study offers a window into the measurable effectiveness of new video ad formats, and it moves forward the broader discussion of online brand-building and advertising,” said Daniel Taylor, senior analyst at Yankee Group. “As the industry develops new ways to engage online audiences, it’s important to benchmark the progress we make. By making this study public, Break and Panache have advanced the entire industry.”

The study conducted by Break and Panache provides a guide for advertisers looking to validate online ad spend and determine the best format and creative to lift key engagement metrics and build brands. It is also intended to spur additional insight on best practices for brands advertising online.

About Break Media

Break Media is the Internet’s premier entertainment community for men. Its wholly owned branded properties (Break.com, Cage Potato, Chickipedia, Holy Taco, Wall Street Fighter and Screen Junkies) and the over 70 site Break Media Network reach 50 million men worldwide each month. Founded in 1998, Break Media offers advertisers unrivaled opportunities to market directly to a young, male demographic using innovative ad formats that introduce relevant brands to the audience either broadly or on a targeted, integrated basis. For more information, please visit http://breakmedia.break.com/.

About Panache

Founded in 2006, Panache is a privately held company headquartered in Los Angeles. The Panache technology enables Internet video sites and networks to dynamically deliver any ad format directly into video content from a third-party ad server or ad network. Ad formats can be generated and delivered to viewers based on profiling and behavioral targeting, resulting in a highly customized experience for the user and a highly scalable model for the video publisher. With Panache, ad formats are completely detached from the video player, allowing publishers to create and deploy new advertising formats in minutes without engineering resources. Panache’s patent-pending solution makes it easy to deliver advanced interactive advertising to all video-distribution channels, including broadband, television, IPTV and other emerging technologies. For more information, visit http://www.panachetech.com.

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.

However simplistic this surrogate of definition is, you’ll be surprised it would actually be a fit for a large percentage of cases. It is, if you wish, a statistically-proven definition.

Still, I hope you will agree this isn’t by far the way an online advertising professional should define rich media.

The most complete, down-to-earth definition is probably the one formulated by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), although they have come to formulate it in regard to ad measurement practices* and not
as a universal, stand alone definition. The IAB defines rich media ads as “advertisements with which users can interact (as opposed to solely animation) in a web page format. These advertisements can be used either singularly or in combination with various technologies, including but not limited to sound, video, or Flash, and with programming languages such as Java, Javascript, and DHTML.”

If we’re to get into a bit more detail, we need to explain that in order for an ad to be classified as ‘rich media ad’, it will need to allow direct and active participation from the viewer, establishing a two-way communication. An ad made of an animated GIF file is not a rich media ad, for example, no matter how flashy, jumpy, animated it is.

Going back to the 40 kB filesize issue, I’m glad to have just discovered a counter example: the Ramp Digital Adplications platform lets you create interactive ads that are under 40kB, thus circumventing rich media fees charged by most ad servers. Ramp says that their ad units are IAB compliant, and they can even enable semantic capabilities so that the ad content delivers real-time dynamic contextual relevance to the page content. Still, Ramp falls into the trap of defining rich media ads as ‘under 40kB’, which is painfully wrong in my opinion**.

What does ‘rich media ad’ means to you, though? In what context do you use the term and how would you define it?

* http://www.iab.net/iab_products_and_industry_services/1421/1443/Rich_Media_Measurement
** http://www.rampdigital.com/adplications

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.

They can usually hold more advertising time and calls to action per minute of content (by comparison with long form video content) and studies show that the user interaction levels are higher.

Metacafe’s most recent deals* will likely please agencies and advertisers looking for quality and legitimate video content to advertise against, as most video platforms are simply un-monetizable due to copyright issues (YouTube, for example).

What’s next for Metacafe? Perhaps renouncing their independent status and graciously accepting an offer from one of the suitors – that’ll be one sweet deal!

*
60 Frames, which finances and syndicates professionally produced short-form digital entertainment and creates unique, highly effective online advertising opportunities for national brands
Aniboom, a leading animation virtual production studio that teams up with creators around the world to produce a wide range of original animated content.
CelebTV.com, which delivers up-to-the-minute entertainment news 24/7, offering the sophistication and credibility of a television news network, while providing the on-demand, real-time benefits of a premium online destination
Collegiate Images, the centralized licensing and rights clearance agency that manages the distribution of copyrighted intellectual property content, focusing exclusively on college sports
Comedy.com, a comedy entertainment site that combines user-generated content and original, professionally produced content from some of the funniest peeps in the business
Comedy Time, the global market leader in original comedy content created for wireless handsets and broadband
Diagonal View, an aggregator of original viral video entertainment
GamePro Media, publishers of GamePro.com and GamePro Magazine, and a division of IDG
Howcast, which shows consumers the web’s most engaging, useful how-to videos wherever, whenever they need to learn how…
SXM, the production company behind “Easy to Assemble,” a scripted Web series written and created by and starring Illeana Douglas, Jeff Goldblum, Tom Arnold, Craig Bierko, Kevin Pollack, Justine Bateman and Ed Begley Jr., and sponsored by IKEA
Wannahaves, an aggregator of videos on the latest gadgets, games and gear
YoungHollywood.com, one of the largest producers of original celebrity programming in Hollywood.

“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.”

go2 Media handles the entire creative development process in-house and in collaboration with agencies and brand partners. The animated banners were first introduced as a creative option by go2 Media at the beginning of the year, and have been incorporated into numerous mobile advertising campaigns. Animated banners are a natural progression that will give advertising campaigns the ability to be increasingly noticed. Current advertisers utilizing the animated banners as a part of their mobile campaigns include Best Buy and Navy.

go2 Media is currently ranked by Nielsen Mobile as one of the top 20 mobile content sites in the U.S. Since 2001, go2 Media has delivered more than one billion WAP page views of local content to mobile phone users across all U.S. carriers. Other go2 specialized mobile sites include go2 Colleges, go2 Pets™, go2 Movies® and more, providing even more detailed local information on-the-go, including pet-friendly beaches, top-rated movies and show times.

About go2 Media
go2 Media™ is a mobile media company that provides users valuable and compelling information fine-tuned for their mobile device. The company has longstanding relationships with carriers and advertisers; industry-leading deck placement, traffic and advertising-supported content; a network of localized, personal mobile correspondents; and multiple platforms for content delivery. go2 Media is headquartered in Boston, Mass. with offices in Santa Ana, Calif. For more information, visit www.go2.com.

go2 and the family of terms carrying the “go2″ prefix are registered and unregistered trademarks or service marks of go2 Media, Inc.

- 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.

“Marketers understand that in the new digital ecosystem, the consumer expects an enhanced level of interaction and engagement with both content and advertising,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. “By defining certain ad formats and offering creative guidance for execution, we are paving the way for even greater adoption by marketers and ongoing innovation by agencies and publishers—that’s exciting for the industry and consumers.”

“The IAB Rich Media and Ad Unit Guidelines are vital to developing consistency within our industry, as well as fostering relationships between publishers and clients in regards to creative submission and creative acceptance,” said Shell Saras, Creative Services Manager, weather.com. “As an industry, if we focus on adhering to initiatives like these guidelines, marketers and clients will have a creative specification resource that is consistently accepted by major participating publishers.”

Members of the industry (advertising agencies, advertisers, online publishers and technology vendors) are encouraged to read the proposed guidelines and submit comments on the IAB site.

- To comment on the Ad Unit Guidelines please go to www.iab.net/Ad_Unit.
- To comment on the Rich Media Creative Guidelines, please go to www.iab.net/Rich_Media.

After the 30-day comment period, the feedback will be reviewed and the guidelines will be finalized and publicly released.

About the IAB:
Founded in 1996, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (www.iab.net) represents over 375 leading interactive companies that actively engage in and support the sale of interactive advertising. IAB members are responsible for selling over 86% of online advertising in the United States. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the continuing growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices, fields interactive effectiveness research, and educates marketers, agencies, and media companies, as well as the wider business community, about the value of interactive advertising

IAB Media Contact:
Marla Nitke
Director, Marketing Communications
212.380.4714
marla@iab.net