Thinking Outside the Player

Beware the buzzword du jour. There’s more to streaming media than streaming media — even if you choose to call it "rich media." It’s time to think outside the player and take stock of the range of important new delivery choices, especially in the area of rich media advertising.

If you put blinders on, you can pretend that the only important decision that you have to make as a rich media producer — or as a marketing manager directing the production of a rich media marketing piece — is your allegiance to one of the "Big Three" media players (Real, Windows Media or QuickTime). However, that’s not a choice based on a complete picture.

The major media players are adding dimensions of interactivity, like chapterization and clickable video features. But progressive download technologies, and Flash- and Java-based video, present viable alternatives that do not require the specialized streaming servers that are necessary to deliver what is technically known as streaming media.

What are the pros and cons for advertising applications? I spoke with some advertising executives at CNN.com and agency TBWA/Chiat/Day to help shed some light.

Java’s Soft Edges

New applications like NetGUI are using Java Applets to perform multiple levels of interactivity. For example, Java can be used to sync HTML presentations to streaming audio (and occasionally video), complete with a custom Java-based navigation system.

To gauge real-world viability and learn more about how and why Java is being used in the advertising world, I spoke with Mike Stoeckel, vice president of Interactive Ad Systems Strategies for CNN’s Internet Technologies division. CNN.com has announced a test of EyeWonder’s Java-based "instant streaming video technologies."

CNN recently faced the fact that ads in streaming media players have a limited reach — in fact, something like 1/500th of the reach of non-player ads. During May 2001, CNN delivered 4.5 million video ads, but during that same month, it delivered 1.75 billion banner ads site-wide.

So CNN started emphasizing 180x150-pixel ads that comfortably include video and tested the EyeWonder solution.

To my eye, the Java video quality is sub-standard, but CNN seems pleased with it.

Flash Clicks

One company using Flash to deliver commercials rather than banners is Unicast, which offers what it calls "Superstitials" as "a premium online advertising category."

As evidence of its platform’s success, Unicast claims that a Mother’s Day Superstitial for Macys.com delivered a 19 percent click-through rate. This exceptional performance was verified by Doug Jaeger, interactive creative director at TBWA/Chiat/Day in New York. The agency’s tests show that Flash Superstitials (including campaigns that the agency has produced for Absolut and Kmart) produced click-through rates of 18 to 26 percent, while animated GIFs, with similar imagery but no sound, produced click-throughs of only 0.5 percent to 1.2 percent. Big difference — the difference between an ad worth producing and a waste of time.

Jaeger said that TBWA/Chiat/Day prefers Flash for its "higher level of interactivity … higher-quality visuals (and) … video-like experience." But Jaeger says they "don’t like video in banner ads." He said that people are just not clicking on "that kind of ad unit" (i.e., banners) anymore. Like CNN, his agency is using larger ad sizes online.

Flicks in Flash

The missing piece in this journey outside of the media player — especially if our goal is to deliver more of a TV commercial experience — is more video. Thanks to a new tool called FLIX from Wildform.com, video can be encoded into Flash’s native SWF, and voila — progressive downloads of video commercials with respectable quality, and without the media player, are available.

Of course, there’s so much more to be done for this kind of technology to become widely adopted. But because of the ubiquity of the Flash player and its built-in, bandwidth-friendly approach to graphics, its open-minded creative community of designers and developers, and its sophisticated interactive capabilities, Flash offers an important alternative to the leading media players.

Watch this space.