The Immedium Blog

Online advertisers have coined the term ‘live banner’ to mean a display ad or banner that contains live data – in other words the content may update after the ad has been published to the Internet and is ‘in flight’. It’s important to recognize the difference between an ad whose content merely changes to a different set of pre-programmed data, and one that can be updated with genuinely new content that didn’t exist at the time the ad was created.

The former is merely a dynamic ad, which uses animated transitions to display different content that is nevertheless contained within the banner ad file produced by the ad agency and distributed by ad servers to your browser. This kind of ad can be programmed to switch content or functionality according to predefined parameters such as date, time, user’s browser etc, but the range of content it can show is finite, due to strict file size limits imposed by publishers, and has to be considered and planned in advance.

A true ‘live banner’ is designed with a number of variable elements that can be edited or switched on the fly to alternate content which is loaded into the ad after it has been distributed. This ability to update means that the live banner can show content which has not been planned or produced in advance, opening the door to the concept of ‘Real-Time Marketing’. Whereas it typically takes days or even weeks to schedule a developer to make changes to a regular Flash banner, the marketing department to approve the revised content, and the ad-ops personnel to re-traffic the ad, a live banner can be edited on the fly by non-technical personnel, and immediately republished to its audience without the need for retrafficking.

Live banners are used for a variety of marketing applications that take advantage of Internet connectivity to adjust the advertising message from time to time according to business needs. A typical application is the promotion of perishable commodities such as airline seats or concert tickets, highlighting real-time availability and perhaps discounting price as the end date gets nearer. Marketing strategists use the technology to try unlimited variations of the same ad, comparing performance to identify the most successful variants and hence optimize their online advertising spend.

With a little more planning and connectivity, live banners can be devised with automatic updating of content. It’s easy to conceive applications whereby advertising content is driven by a web database or enterprise system, steering attention to opportunities which match the advertiser’s specific business needs as they change, day by day or even minute by minute.

Live banners can be produced using various technologies, though Adobe’s Flash is currently the most popular choice given its widespread adoption by the online advertising community. Flash provides comprehensive cross-platform browser support, strong multimedia capability, and a powerful scripting language for flexible programming, including various options to handle the import of external data. It’s also very easy for advertisers to deliver, containing multimedia elements, textual copy, program script and fonts within a single SWF file.

How do advertisers create and manage campaigns with several live banners, each needing to be securely edited, verified, published and tracked? Our solution is Immedium – the real-time advertising platform. To learn more, download the Advertiser’s Guide to Immedium.

With all the attention that HTML5 has gathered lately, web developers who have spent years painstakingly building their knowledge and expertise in Adobe Flash may be nervously wondering if their skills will still have any value a year or two from now.

Flash is a rich environment with a comprehensive feature set, and it takes a significant investment in time and effort to become proficient in its use. It’s worth remembering that many of Flash’s most ardent users are web designers rather than software developers, who have no formal training in animation or programming. Largely self-taught, they’ve learned their way around Flash the hard way, by getting stuck in to projects they probably weren’t equipped for, getting into difficulty, and then having to scour the web for tips and tricks to overcome their problems.

Even those who were reasonably comfortable with Flash’s programming environment found they had a steep learning curve when Adobe introduced ActionScript 3, a powerful scripting language that forces users to go back to basics and rigorously apply the concepts of object-oriented programming. For many that transition was too difficult, and while Adobe gained plaudits from full-time developers for evolving the platform such that it could be considered for ‘heavy-duty’ projects, they also lost support from some of their early users along the way.

Those that stayed the course and familiarized themselves with AS3 became highly productive, exploiting the capabilities and features of the extended language and a rewritten Flash Player v10, with its multiplatform support and improved performance. Indeed, the Flash environment seemed ready to deliver on its promise to provide ‘everything you need to create and deliver compelling applications, content, and video to the widest possible audience across screens and devices’.

And then Steve Jobs delivered his now famous body blow to Adobe’s aspirations for Flash, first by announcing that the iPhone and iPad would not support it, and on 29^th April 2010, writing an open letter entitled ‘Thoughts on Flash’ citing a series of reasons why he made that decision. In case you’ve forgotten, they include:

• Flash is not open. It’s only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to its future enhancement, pricing, etc.
• Flash has a bad security record.
• Flash is the number one reason Macs crash.
• Flash video requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips.
• Flash was designed for PCs and mice, not mobile devices and touch.
• Flash doesn’t perform well on mobile devices
• Flash comprises a layer of abstraction between the programs and the platform that leads to sub-standard applications.

Whether or not you agree with all of his comments, they resonated enough with the web community to damage confidence in Flash as a platform with a long-term future, and to question its adoption for new projects.

Fast forward to November 2010, and what’s changed? Adobe has released Flash CS5 and Flash Player 10.1. Together they provide support for new APIs with multitouch and gesture events, video streaming that automatically adapts to different network conditions, support for accelerometer input, global error handling to improve application reliability and catch unexpected runtime errors, H.264 video encoding, Sleep Mode for mobile use, support for Android, Windows Phone 7, PalmWebOs, Symbian, and Blackberry, and support for mobile text input from native device virtual keyboards.

It’s clear that Adobe has got the message and they’re not going to quietly retire the product that has become the defacto web standard for not only video delivery, but also display advertising. While HTML5 provides native support for H.264 encoded video, not all popular browsers have embraced it and it will take some time for HTML5 to be able to deliver comprehensive cross-platform browser support for video in the way that Flash can, and has been doing for some years now.

But Flash is not just prized for its video delivery. The advertising community still heavily relies on Flash for cross-platform delivery of animated banners to the desktop. This is an application where HTML5 has yet to make a dent, and where Flash is consolidating its dominance. Developers are now recognizing the benefits of building banners with Actionscript 3, and ad-serving platforms, systems and processes are being enhanced accordingly.

Will the advertising community ditch Flash in favor of HTML5? Not anytime soon, at least not for the desktop. Flash is well entrenched, well-understood, and works too well across all browser platforms. Very importantly, and this is an issue that’s often overlooked, it’s straightforward for an advertiser to produce and deliver a banner ad to third parties for hosting and distribution. A single SWF file contains all the code you need for the job, optionally embedding fonts, graphics and images into the same file. It couldn’t be simpler. The SWF format is highly optimized for this purpose, yielding compressed files which are small enough to load fast, yet powerful enough to attract and interact with users.

Meanwhile we’re still figuring out what HTML5 can do, let alone how to package and deliver reliably the combination of CSS, Javascript,  HTML , fonts and image files that comprises the total solution. So while HTML5 is maturing and standardizing, Adobe is delivering mobile platform capability and ever more powerful multimedia processing behaviors to the Flash advertising community. There’s little doubt that HTML5 will be dominant in the mobile world, but on desktops and tablets (iPad excepted), Flash will be hard to displace.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) released new numbers this week that show record-breaking growth in online advertising sales. Their third quarter 2010 study showed a 17% increase over the same period in 2009 – a full $6.4 billion in ad revenue.

Does anyone still use Flash? You bet.

We’re particularly pleased to announce the signing of a distribution agreement with NoIS Value Corporation, who have their headquarters in Tokyo but also have an office in the beautiful island of Okinawa. NoIS Value will market the Immedium service throughout Japan, and are also authorized to appoint resellers in the country.

The agreement recognizes Immedium Inc’s localization of the user console to support Japanese language, and also development of the platform to support editable ads with custom Japanese fonts – a significant achievement given the range of the Kanji alphabet and resulting font file sizes. Our solution maintains full flexibility in editing content while streamlining file size for fast ad downloads.

We’re excited about the potential for Immedium in Japan, where the appetite for new technology is unlimited and broadband Internet is ubiquitous. For more information, contact:

NoIS Value Corporation, EG Building 7F, 3-3-2 Nakameguro, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-0061, Japan.

Tel: 03-5773-1757       Email: info@noisvalue.co.jp

www.noisvalue.co.jp