research research report September 2005

The Evolution of Rich Media Advertising: Current Market Trends, Success Metrics and Best Practices

AutHORS

Executive Summary..............................................................................................1

By Marissa Gluck, Radar Research, and Rick E. Bruner, Director of Research, DoubleClick

Rich Media, the Early Years..................................................................................1

With data and analysis from Heather Dougherty, Senior Analyst, Nielsen//NetRatings, plus data from Dynamic Logic and other sources

Defining Rich Media..............................................................................................3 Who Is Using Rich Media?....................................................................................4 Measuring Success...............................................................................................6 Rich Media and Branding Effectiveness.............................................................8 Case Study: Digitas and CPG Marketer........................................................... 12 Challenges Remain............................................................................................. 13 Conclusions: Advice for the Future.................................................................. 13

Executive Summary Rich media has elevated web display advertising to new realms of possibility– video, audio, animation, interactive features, games and more. More advertisers than ever are using rich media to create cool ads that entertain, engage, educate and encourage product sales with online audiences. Rich media offers unprecedented capabilities for measuring consumer interactions with the ad, such as the rate and time of interactions, video plays and custom events. The advanced levels of brand interactions that rich media offers to advertisers deliver results in terms of brand impact: rich media performs significantly better than GIF/JPG ads, particularly for ad awareness and message association. When interactivity and especially video are added to the mix, the impact on brand metrics can be tremendous. As rich media advertising continues to grow, advertisers face a variety of challenges. This white paper examines several key issues, including which kinds of marketers are leading rich media adoption, how they are measuring audience engagement and brand impact, and what new emerging technologies, such as online video, have them most excited. The paper includes a case study from a leading digital marketing agency, best practice advice and additional insights about how this promising form of online advertising is constantly evolving.

Rich Media, the Early Years Ten years ago, advertising on the Internet consisted mainly of 468x60-pixel GIF or JPG banners at the top of web pages. Then, in late 1996, two years after the appearance of the first GIF banners on Hotwired.com1, Hewlett Packard and San Francisco-based online agency, Red Sky Interactive, introduced a significant innovation to online advertising: a game embedded within a banner ad that let users play the videogame classic “Pong.”

See DoubleClick’s report “The Decade in Online Advertising, 1994-2004,” free to download at doubleclick.com/knowledge.

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The Evolution of Rich Media Advertising

Chris Hurwitz, the programmer of the original Figure 1

HP’s Pong: Arguably the first rich media ad banner

banner, has since posted an internal Red Sky email from January 1997 to his personal website, that reads in part, “The most impressive news: according to [a ‘CNET tech guy’], the normal click-through rate on an

Source: Hewlett Packard and Red Sky Interactive, 1996

ad banner is 1.5% - 2%. The Pong banner is getting 4-8%, which is DOUBLE TO QUADRUPLE compared to other banners.” “Rich media” online advertising was born, and the word was, it worked! Quickly a dizzying array of advertising units erupted online: pop-ups, floating, expandable, interactive, Flash, Java, 3D, integrated video and more all came “streaming” into our browsers. Suddenly, mainstream advertisers, who fuel the $60 billion television advertising engine, started to pay attention to online advertising. These new features in online ads – sound, video, animation, interactivity, product demos, games – clearly elevated the medium beyond strict direct response to a creative vehicle capable of brand impact. Along with the rich features came a range of rich metrics beyond the onedimensional click-through rate. Now advertisers can track the time people spent interacting with the ad, the

“In an era where consumers control their media experiences, rich media provides more valuable and engaging experiences than most standard online advertising. When executed well, rich media can exponentially out-perform standard ad units.” Jason Heller, Managing Director, Horizon Interactive

time the ad displayed on the page, various levels of user engagement and more. On top of that, traditional brand metrics, such as brand favorability, message association and purchase intent, which had little applicability to standard GIF/JPG banners, have become commonplace components of post-campaign reporting for many rich media advertisers. In those early days, rich media ads were an experiment. Creating them required special programming skills, and their formats lacked common industry standards. Websites were cautious about hosting them for fear the custom programming would be a drag on the site’s performance or explode in users’ browsers. And while most people were still on slow dial-up Internet connections, the larger file sizes of rich media ads could further delay an already slow surfing experience. As the web grew, however, rich media ads started to become an everyday fixture of the web experience. Although standards still remain elusive, the basic formats and technologies have become mainstream. Macromedia’s Flash programming platform, ubiquitously supported by modern browsers, underpins almost all ads of this type today. After a few years, advertisers, agencies and publishers were first served by several specialized point solutions, including Enliven, Unicast and Eyeblaster, who exploited demand in the marketplace to offer platforms that added ad-specific functionality to Flash, including tools specialized for rich media ad design, deployment and reporting. As the market has matured, the larger ad management platform providers, including DoubleClick, have come out with their own rich media solutions.

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The Evolution of Rich Media Advertising

As advertisers have seen the gains in efficiency to be found in unified reporting and close integration with their principal ad serving systems, the bigger ad management platforms have begun to take a larger share of the market. The market for rich media solutions continues to consolidate, such as in the last year Gannett’s acquisition of PointRoll and Viewpoint’s acquisition of Unicast (which in turn bought Enliven a couple of years earlier). At the same time that advertisers Figure 2

Growth in use of rich media advertising mirrors broadband adoption

started to get excited about rich media advertising, Internet users started to get excited about broadband. The rapid consumer adoption of high-speed Internet connections has helped fuel the boom in rich media ads. By the end of 2004, more than half of U.S. Internet users were connecting online via broadband access, and at the same time advertisers were serving a third of all online ads in Flash format, according to

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, 2000 - 2005

Nielsen//NetRatings (Figure 2).

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), U.S. advertisers spent $1 billion on rich media ads in 2004, up from $800 million in 2003. In both of those years, rich media accounted for 11% of all online marketing expenditures (which otherwise also include search ads, classifieds, email and more), according to the IAB.

Defining Rich Media Exactly what constitutes “rich media” in online advertising remains a moving target. For many advertisers and publishers, the definition is along the lines of “I know it when I see it.” In particular, many publishers add a premium to pricing for what they deem to be “rich media” based on how interruptive the ads are to the consumer experience or the complexity of the implementation and reporting functionality of the campaign. Likewise, advertisers may consider an ad rich media only when it exceeds a certain threshold of razzmatazz. The simplest objective definition of rich media is web advertising units based on technologies more complex than GIF or JPG images and simple animation. The most common technologies for rich media ads are Flash, Java and DHTML. Of those, Flash dominates overwhelmingly: according to Nielsen//NetRatings, 97% of the ads its AdRelevance system tracked in those rich formats in 2004 were based on Flash. Specialized rich media advertising platforms, including DART MotifSM, PointRoll and Eyeblaster, are based on Flash but then add additional advertising-specific features such as streamlined ad design tools, over-the-page ad formats, ad serving, tracking and reporting capabilities. Further confusing the definition of rich media, some advertisers are opting to track almost all of their online ads, including GIF/JPG ones, through integrated ad management and rich media systems for the added reporting features the rich media tracking provides (such as duration of ad exposure and mouseovers). Meanwhile, some publishers do not necessarily bother to add a “rich” pricing premium to basic campaigns served through such systems.

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The Evolution of Rich Media Advertising

Nonetheless, for the purposes of this paper, the term “rich media” applies to any ads served in Flash or other advanced formats, razzle-dazzle notwithstanding. Rich media is a term broad enough to encompass new types of ad formats that will invariably come down the pike for a few more years. Streaming video, which first made its appearance in online ads in the late 1990s, has gained considerable momentum with advertisers since 2004. Judging from brandeffectiveness research reviewed later in this paper, it is easy to see why advertisers are so enthusiastic about this popular format. Publishers are presently scrambling to compile much more video content to bundle together with video ads to meet significant advertiser demand. Video further confuses the rich media definition for all parties involved. “In-page” (sometimes called “inbanner”) video involves placing streaming content within a display ad on a web page. This fits squarely within the rich media world, is served by all the same vendors, and is usually based on Flash technology. “In-stream” video, however, involves inserting pre-roll or post-roll video ads within video content on a publisher’s site. In-stream video is often considered a form of rich media, but is rarely based in Flash, is almost entirely controlled by the publishers, has limited tracking capabilities, and often doesn’t require much of the agencies involved other than mailing a video tape. Rich media ads also come in many shapes, sizes and feature implementations. To simplify these, DoubleClick describes most rich media executions by the following standard formats:

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In-page: standard IAB ad unit shapes that may include advanced rich media functionality, such as embedded games, animation, video, registration forms or interactive marketing brochures, and which may allow for larger file sizes through polite download technology

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Expandable: similar to in-page units, but they expand in size when a user moves his mouse over the ad or clicks to interact with it. Some publishers are experimenting with ads that automatically expand when the page loads, then retract after a small delay. These ads are sometimes called “push downs” or “server-initiated expandables”

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Floating: ads that appear as a layer on top of the user’s current page; these are typically free-form ads that can move across the page in a variety of shapes and sizes and which may “resolve” into an in-page ad on the same page or a smaller floating “reminder” ad unit which continues to float above the page

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Pop-ups: ads that launch a new smaller browser window that appears above the open page (possibly not long for this world due to the advancement of “pop-up blockers”)

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Transitionals: also known as “between-page ads” or “interstitials,” these ads appears between one page and another as a user clicks through a site

Who Is Using Rich Media? Rich media’s advanced creative possibilities and its effectiveness at improving brand and direct response performance continue to advance its popularity with advertisers, and particularly Fortune 500 firms. According to Nielsen//Netratings AdRelevance, 39% of advertising impressions for Fortune 500 companies in 2004 were formatted with rich media technologies. (See Figure 3, next page)

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The Evolution of Rich Media Advertising

Figure 3

Over a third of all ad impressions for Fortune 500 companies used rich media in 2004

Most Industries Devote a Quarter to Half of All Web Display Ad Impressions to Rich Media Some categories of advertisers rely more heavily upon rich media than others. Automotive and telecommunications companies are dedicating over half of their online impressions to rich media, as shown in Figure 4. Entertainment companies also devote almost half of their web ad impressions to rich media, and consumer product goods (CPG) firms are not far behind with 39%. Perhaps because of their direct response focus, business-to-business (B2B)

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance, 2004. Excludes House Ads.

and retail businesses appear least enthralled with rich media, dedicating only 17% and

Figure 4

Auto and telecom dedicated over half of all their online ad impressions to rich media in 2004

12% of their total online impressions to such ads respectively. Financial, Telecom and Web Media Account for Largest Volume of Rich Media Impressions by Advertiser Industry Looking at volume rather than market share of impressions, financial services are the top category of rich media advertisers, with almost 50 billion impressions in 2004 (see Figure 5). Telecom is close behind, with over 44 billion impressions last year. Software and B2B companies, with smaller overall advertising levels, served only 5.5 to 6 billion

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance, 2004.

Figure 5

rich media impressions.

Financial services and telecom lead in sheer volume of rich media impressions

Publishers Capitalize on Advertiser Interest in Rich Media While advertisers are deploying a greater percentage of rich media impressions, publishers are responding to the increased demand. Not surprisingly, music/ streaming media is the top category for publishers allocating inventory to rich media, almost 45%, as shown in Figure 6 (on following page). Close behind is sports/recreation, which attracts advertiser categories such as entertainment, financial services and automotive

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance, 2004

manufacturers, all heavy rich media users. 5

The Evolution of Rich Media Advertising

Figure 6

Music, sports, family, entertainment and games publishers run more than a third of their ads in rich media formats

However, sites that tend to be informationintensive with task-focused audiences, such as financial information sites, employment sites and information directories, dedicate much less of their inventory to rich media. In terms of sheer volume, the giant portals, with the important inclusion of their webbased email services, tremendously dominate the market of rich media impressions, as Figure 7 shows. At 56.6 billion for web email services in 2004 and 45.6 billion for the rest of inventory of search portals, that constitutes 43% of the total market of rich media impressions last year, according to Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance. Yahoo! alone accounts for 64% of all rich media on web-based email systems, followed by MSN with another 32%. General and national news sites host 11% of the total rich media market, followed by

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance, 2004

sports and recreation sites with 10% at 25 billion impressions in 2004.

Figure 7

Portals dominate the lion’s share of total rich media impressions in 2004

Measuring Success Among the great appeals of rich media for advertisers is the detailed extent to which advertisers can track user interactions with the ads. Rich media tracking features far exceed what is possible from standard online advertising, not to mention traditional broadcast and print advertising. In the world of standard web display ads, the principal campaign metrics are counts of the number of impressions delivered and the number of users who click on those ads. For advertisers that take the extra effort, by

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance, 2004

tagging their site pages with web beacons that match back to the ad server (“Spotlight

tags” in the case of the DART system), ad reports can also measure sales conversions, registrations and other post-click activities (without storing any of the personally identifiable information of the consumers in the ad reports). Valuable as those metrics are, they do not reveal the range of interactions consumers may have with the ads before they click, which rich media technologies now make possible. Rich media’s advanced metrics

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The Evolution of Rich Media Advertising

can provide advertisers with much greater insights as to what is working and not working with their ad campaigns. Common Rich Media Advertising Metrics

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Display time: how long on average the ads were displayed on the web page. By comparing sites within the media schedule, advertisers can get a sense of which types of sites offer shorter or longer ad exposure times

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Interaction rate: the percentage of the audience that engages with the ad unit. The lowest common denominator for “interaction” is a mouse-over, some portion of which may be incidental, so advertisers should be sure to also specify actions they can track that indicate true user engagement, such as ad expansion or otherwise intentional involvement with the ad content

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Interaction time: the amount of time users spend engaging with the ad. This is a crucial metric for understanding how successful ads are at engaging consumers, particularly for ads designed to draw users in with detailed features, such as multiple page brochure-type ads or games

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Expansion rate: for expandable ads, the rate at which viewers exposed to the ads cause them to expand. Where expansion is triggered with a mouse-over, marketers should closely watch the “close” function and/or interaction time to get a sense of what portion of those expansions are accidental and unwanted by consumers

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Video views and completions*: the start and finish rate for video ads. Since in-banner video ads may be either initiated by user interaction (e.g., “click play”) or by default upon page load, starts and completions can provide important information on levels of user interest

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Average video view time*: another way to gauge the popularity of video ads with viewers is to compare the average length of play with the total length of the ad

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Video pauses, rewinds, mutes*: some rich media tracking systems also enable advertisers to track how often users take further actions with video ads, such as these

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Exit links: the ability to present and track multiple click-through destinations in a single ad unit

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Custom events: virtually any other action users may take on a rich media ad – screens of copy within the ad viewed, ad content printed, form fields completed and much more – can be tracked if the ad is designed to track those events

* In the current state of the industry, detailed video specific metrics are not generally available for instream video, only in-banner. Best Practice Advice for Reporting:

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Track what’s important, and that’s all. You can quickly become overwhelmed with the tracking options available through rich media vendor systems. DART Motif, for example, offers up to 30 unique metrics per creative. After the campaign is done, though, you may be hard-pressed to understand or explain what some of those metrics mean. Your time and energy is much better spent tracking 2-3 metrics that are really important to your creative. If your ad includes a game, track plays. If your ad includes a “Learn More” tab, track how many people click on it.

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The Evolution of Rich Media Advertising

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Integrate your metrics. With all the fancy rich media metrics, you may forget your basics. Make sure the results of your rich media campaign will mesh with your existing conversion tracking, ROI analysis and workflow so each campaign doesn’t become an analytical nightmare.

Rich Media and Branding Effectiveness In addition to the metrics discussed above for tracking direct consumer interactions with the ad units, online marketers often use survey techniques to measure the brand impact of their ads, given the highly engaging capabilities of rich media formats. Working with research firms such as Dynamic Logic and Insight Express, which specialize in measuring online brand effectiveness, advertisers can gauge how well ads perform at getting noticed, driving home key messages and encouraging people to actually buy the product or service. Common Brand Effectiveness Metrics

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Online ad awareness: also known as “ad recall,” whether consumers remember seeing a company’s advertising campaign

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Unaided or aided brand awareness: the extent to which consumers think of or recognize a company’s brand, with or without prompting

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Brand favorability: the extent to which consumers perceive the brand positively

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Message association: the extent to which consumers attribute characteristics to a company or product that were the subject of the ad campaign

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Purchase intent: likelihood that consumers will buy the advertiser’s product or service any time soon

The standard methodology for this type of online brand effectiveness research is a classic market research model known as “experimental design,” where one group of users is exposed to a “test ad” (the advertiser’s actual ad) as part of a real campaign on live sites, while another group is exposed to a “control ad” (typically a public service announcement). Members of both groups, kept separate through cookies, are then invited to partake in a survey that questions them about ad awareness, brand awareness and the other brand metrics described above. In this way, advertisers can see the change in the metrics between the exposed group and the unexposed (control) group, the only difference between the two groups being the ads they each saw. For example, if in the control group, 60% of respondents recognized a company’s brand when prompted vs. 66% of the exposed group, the ad would have a 6-point “delta,” or a 10% “lift,” on aided awareness. Dynamic Logic has been conducting brand effectiveness research studies like these for six years and has collected and categorized more than 2,000 such surveys in an analytical system called MarketNorms. By looking across a large number of such surveys, one can compare average brand lift by various campaign characteristics, such as one vertical industry against others, or rich media versus non-rich media campaigns, as shown in the following figures. All Online Ads Increase Brand Metrics, But Rich Media More So Rich media, as well as standard GIF and JPG ads, have a positive effect on brand metrics, as shown in Figure 8 (next page). Compared to control groups, groups exposed to both GIF/JPG and rich media ads had a modest but significant impact on aided brand awareness, favorability and purchase intent.

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The Evolution of Rich Media Advertising

Figure 8

Rich media creates greater increases in brand metrics than standard Web ads

The ads have the largest impact on lifting ad awareness (aka “recall”), especially so for rich media ads. Ad awareness increased 7.5 percentage points above the control group for GIF/JPG ads, compared to 9.0 points increase for rich media. Pharma, Entertainment, Others See Big Lift in Awareness From Rich Media MarketNorms shows that rich media ads significantly outperform GIF and JPG format ads when it comes to increasing people’s likelihood to remember seeing an ad. This

Source: Dynamic Logic MarketNorms, Q2 2005; Delta equals Exposed minus Control

is especially true for certain industries, such as auto, electronics, entertainment, pharmaceuticals and travel, as shown in

Figure 9

Rich media increases ad awareness for all industries

Figure 9. Best Practice Advice for Brand Awareness:

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Maximize the amount of logo presence. Various research, such as Marketing Evolution’s “The Five Platinum Rules to Online Advertising Creative,” has shown brand awareness generally improves when the ads feature the company’s logo prominently throughout as much of the ad’s animation as possible. Punching the brand quickly at the end of the animation, as ads often do, is typically less effective

Source: Dynamic Logic MarketNorms, Q2 2005; Delta equals Exposed minus Control; note - Electronics and Travel contain fewer than 30 campaigns for GIF/JPG

than a constant logo presence.

• Figure 10

Rich media also increases message association for many industries

Tread with care on “the annoyance factor.” Recall in and of itself isn’t necessarily a good thing. We can all remember a few Internet ads we’d rather forget but for their jumping in our faces 10,000 times.

Some Industries Outperform Others for Rich Media and Message Association Rich media also improves message association for most, but not all industries examined in the MarketNorms database. CPG, consumer electronics and entertainment companies found the greatest increases in Source: Dynamic Logic MarketNorms, Q2 2005; Delta equals Exposed minus Control

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message association using rich media, as shown in Figure 10.

The Evolution of Rich Media Advertising

Best Practice Advice for Message Association:

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K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Too often, advertisers using rich media ads get lost in the possibilities and overcomplicate ads with multiple messages and calls to action, bogging the ad down with too much text and other distractions. If communicating a key message about the product or the brand is an important objective of the campaign, then state it clearly and elegantly and don’t ask too much more from viewers.

Figure 11

Interactivity in rich media ads increases message association further for most industries

Interactivity Great for Some Industries, Not So Much For Others Adding interactive features to rich media ads (which can range widely, including quizzes, forms, games, expandability and on and on) can have a dramatic effect on message associations. Auto and entertainment marketers nearly doubled the message association increases over control groups compared to GIF/ JPG ads, as shown in Figure 11. Consumer electronics marketers in the MarketNorms sample had apparently cracked the secrets

Source: Dynamic Logic MarketNorms, Q2 2005; Delta equals Exposed minus Control

to increasing message association with interactivity, seeing a 6-fold improvement

over GIF/JPG ads. Travel, technology and financial services firms, however, appear to be still struggling to figure how interactivity improves message association. Best Practice Advice for Interactivity:

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Give them something worthwhile to do. The name of the game in today’s crowded ad and media environment is “consumer engagement.” Consumers have many other important and interesting things to do with their time. If an advertiser can succeed in capturing some of consumers’ valuable time, the experience had better be worth it. Consider business objectives and the consumer value proposition very carefully.

Video Is Rich Media’s Killer App for Brand Objectives The apparent effectiveness of online video, judging by the aggregate results of early adopters who have run Dynamic Logic studies, suggests that the popularity of this format online is likely to boom in the next few years. Figure 12 (next page) shows that video roughly tripled the increase for all these key brand metrics compared to GIF/JPG display ads. Best Practice Advice for Online Video:

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Strive for more than just recycled TV spots. Many advertisers are tempted to simply convert existing TV ads into digital format and use those for their online video ad campaigns. Most consumers, however, would likely prefer to see the online medium as something more original, engaging, amusing than same old same old. This is particularly true of video as part of an in-banner

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The Evolution of Rich Media Advertising

Figure 12

unit, which typically requires user initiation

Video has a tremendous impact on brand lift compared to GIF/JPG ads

to play. For in-stream video ads (where the ad is embedded as part of a video content file, typically as a 15-second pre-roll), original online content may be less vital, as the user has little choice but to watch the ad to get to the content. Either way, originality is key to being noticed and remembered.

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Integrate video into creative concepts. The best in-banner video campaigns integrate the video into the overall creative to tell a story, demo a product, or otherwise communicate the brand

Source: Dynamic Logic MarketNorms, Q2 2005; Delta equals Exposed minus Control

message.

Games Still a Hot Button for Rich Media Ads The Pong banner was a strong start for online advergames, and, “Punch the Monkey” notwithstanding, marketers have been using games in ads successfully ever since to increase brand engagement. Orbitz has been particularly successful at encouraging brand interaction through the use of games in its advertising. Despite the dubious reputation of pop-ups and pop-unders, Orbitz has proven that even this format can greatly entertain some people when interactive games are well deployed. In 2003, Mark Rattin, the creative director at Orbitz’s agency, Otherwise, told eMarketer about the efficacy of a campaign: “We do have quantifiable data, and what we’ve seen is that the more games that we introduce, and the higher frequency [with which] we’re able to change these games out, the more consistently we’re able to drive very, very high levels of traffic to the site. We get, generally speaking, double what the industry average is on a pop-under click-through, from a percentage standpoint.” Best Practice Advice for Advergames:

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Make a good game. More than 40% of Internet users play online games, and publishing highquality online games is already a big content business, so advertisers can’t afford to scrimp on the quality of game play.

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Target women also, but with different game types. Women represent half or more of all online gamers by most survey accounts. But typically women favor different types of games than men, more along the lines of parlor games, quizzes and intellectual puzzles than first-person shooters, sports or car racing.

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Case Study: Digitas Rich Media Campaign Launches CPG Product Twenty-five-year-old Digitas LLC is one of the country’s leading digital and direct marketing agencies. Michelle O’Connor, the Associate Director of Media, told us of a campaign her company managed in 2005 using DART Motif for a major consumer packaged goods client launching a new product directed at male consumers. Goals The goal for this new product’s first campaign was to drive brand awareness in a relatively new category then dominated by a single competitor. Additionally, the secondary goal was to drive brand engagement through an interactive online experience. Digitas designed a campaign consisting of two, 10-week ad flights, the second optimized based on learnings from the first. Execution The campaign ran on numerous sites, including portals like Yahoo!, entertainment sites like MTV and ifilm, game sites like EA.com and lifestyle sites like Maxim, among others. The creative included an interactive game at the brand’s destination site and rich media ad units on the campaign sites, both hosted and delivered via DART Motif. The creative unit was a floating ad that ran for a short time and then collapsed to a banner ad. Measurement With two goals – generating awareness and engagement – Digitas used discrete metrics and measuring tools to evaluate success. To evaluate brand awareness, Digitas needed to know if the campaign reached the target audience, whether exposure to the ads increased awareness and influenced user attitudes, and which ad messaging strategy was most effective for reaching those goals. Additionally, Digitas needed to drill down into various key audience subgroups to understand effectiveness. To evaluate these objectives, Digitas looked at demographic profiles and attitudinal metrics such as:

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Online ad awareness

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Unaided and aided brand awareness

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Brand favorability

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Message association

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Purchase intent

To measure these metrics, Digitas conducted a brand study with Dynamic Logic that included an online survey and used an exposed vs. control method. To measure customer engagement, particularly with the interactive games, Digitas focused on questions including how did engagement levels vary by site, placement and creative, and what were the key drivers of response. Digitas also looked at metrics such as game play rate, click rate and post-click activity rates. Digitas tracked these metrics through a combination of DART for Advertisers, Motif and Spotlight tags. Results Results for all awareness metrics saw above-average increases. Additionally, click rates and game play rates were significantly higher than what the agency and client had forecast.

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The Evolution of Rich Media Advertising

The brand ads also drove high click rates despite no explicit call to action. For this campaign, Digitas found that floating units tended to perform better than transitional ads for increasing attitudinal metrics. “Digitas learned from this campaign more about how rich media can strongly impact brand attitudinal metrics and drive consumer engagement, and the agency will use those learnings in subsequent campaigns for this client and others,” said O’Connor.

Challenges Remain With all the excitement around rich media, along with the demonstrated results, the question arises, why aren’t advertisers using rich media even more than they are now? The fact is that many challenges remain for agencies and advertisers looking to deploy rich media campaigns, along with publishers looking to offer rich media inventory. Some of the key challenges include:

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Standards lacking: Although the IAB has published rich media guidelines, there remains a great deal of variety in publisher standards for rich media. Requirements vary for kilobyte size, interaction methods (user-initiated vs. server-initiated), creative guidelines and many other details, which are far more granular than those imposed on non-rich media creatives.

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Need for innovation: Rich media inherently defies standardization. No matter what standards are imposed, agencies and advertisers want to push the envelope to break out of the clutter. This creates a dynamic away from standardization and towards custom work.

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Technology complex: Flash is a complex platform to build upon, and adding custom APIs from each vendor makes the process of creating effective and bug-free ads difficult for many designers.

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Integration needed: Back when rich media made up a small portion of ad buys, it was perfectly acceptable to use non-standard workflows to execute and track these campaigns. With the maturity of the industry and the increasing importance of the buys, the pain of non-integrated solutions becomes acute.

Conclusions: Advice for the Future

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The key new advertising metric is “consumer engagement.” Like it or not, we now live in a consumer-controlled media world. TV advertisers are just coming to grips with this in the face of TiVo and other digital video recorders (DVR) (not to mention video-on-demand, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) and more in the world of interactive-TV). Nowhere is this truer, though, than online. If blocking or closing an online ad isn’t an option, closing the page it’s on is. Advertisers now have to earn the attention, if not the respect, of consumers in order just to get their ads seen. Rich media – in the form of video, interactive units, games and more – is a powerful tool in this new world of consumer permission and “invertising.”2

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Plan, measure, optimize. Advertisers can’t know whether they’ve had success unless they are clear on their objectives in the first place. Then, you can’t improve what you don’t measure, and rich media provides tremendous measurement capabilities. But improve you must; too many advertisers leave out the critical phase of a second campaign wave that optimizes the creative unit and media placements based on learnings from a first wave.

2

See more analysis on this theme of consumer-controlled media and “invertising” in DoubleClick’s “The Decade in Online Advertising: 1994-2004” report.

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Aim for “brand-response.” For years advertisers have clung largely to two disparate camps of brand versus direct-response orientation. This is a false dichotomy. Rich media is the ideal platform for a merging of these two marketing philosophies, where advertisers can precisely measure consumer interactions while at the same time create powerful brand media.

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Online video is the next big thing. For the next few years, video advertising online is likely to surge. Presently, online video takes the form primarily of in-banner video units, typically userinitiated clips inside standard ad sizes, and in-stream pre-roll spots in downloadable or streaming video content clips. As publishers increase inventory for these spots, expect dollars to flow rapidly from “traditional” rich media, to video-enhanced rich media.

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Be original, inventive, bold. Rich media is a suite of tools that lets the best minds in creative departments explore their wildest dreams. Consumers are jaded with advertising. They are sick to death of the run of the mill. Grab their attention and hold onto it with something terrific, hilarious, fascinating, useful or otherwise out of the ordinary.

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Make life easier. Deploying rich media isn’t as easy as anyone would like, due to a lack of standards, disparate technologies, and the inherent complexity in doing cutting-edge work. But good planning and communication can overcome many of these obstacles. Rich media vendors like DART Motif can help facilitate the back-and-forth between agency, publisher and creative to make sure everyone’s on the same page. Timelines are always tight, but you can ease the pain by treating the routine campaigns routinely and giving yourself extra lead time for anything “outside the box.”

About DoubleClick DoubleClick is a global leader in digital marketing technology and services. From its position at the nerve center of digital marketing, DoubleClick provides unique insights and insider knowledge no one else can. Headquartered in New York, and with 17 offices and development hubs and 14 data centers worldwide, the company employs more than 1,300 people. Learn more at www.doubleclick.com.

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