News

Rich Media Disabled Update

Written on: March 6th 2006
Author: by Editor |
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As we reported last week, some significant changes in the way that Microsoft Internet Explorer renders rich media have been made. Currently the patch is optional, thus the immediate impact to the industry may be very minimal, but insiders have told ADOTAS that this patch will become part of the update process and that all new versions of Windows will include this dramatic change. We have learned that things are not nearly as dramatic as many people believed.

ADOTAS has learned that many ad serving providers that use IFRAME in their serving process will not be able to serve many flash creatives that require any interaction with the user, including certain types of click-throughs. It seems that flash banners that only require a click-through on the entire creative are not affected, but interactive banners including the infamous “shoot-the-monkey” type creates may all have problems with a large part of advertising servers. Those serving solutions that serve through Java-Script seem to have an easy fix, and many may not be affected. We are currently investigating which serving solutions are going to be affected.

Additionally, many major rich media providers will be extensively affected, and they are currently working on a turn-around. Please note that all of them are working on fixes, and expect them finished by at least the end of the month, if not sooner.

Reader Comments.

The HTML content that is referenced by an IFRAME tag can contain a tag that references external JavaScript content. The external JavaScript reference can create the required tags dynamically as was suggested in the related IE Patch documentation. This approach might add an additional roundtrip of data transfer when a rich media ad is served, but it is still a reasonable solution. Thus, interactive content can, in fact, be served by IFRAME tags as well.

From a technical point of view, this IE patch is nothing but a “small” headache for ad serving technology providers and web publishers.

Regards,
Michael Zino
snap2eyes CTO