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Robin Stanton is owner of WebServices4All.com Ad Agency and sits as VP of Sales and New Business for Synervation.net affiliate network and Media company. Robin has been in the online industry since 1998 working with advertisers, agencies and small businesses, and is always on the lookout for the next big thing in Online Advertising.

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Going Retro: An Old School Answer to New Flash Ad Concerns

Written on
March 13th 2006
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by Robin Stanton  |
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Uh-oh a patch that can disable flash ads, released by Microsoft? How could they do such a thing? Did you know Firefox has the same issue? And last question, is it really going to be that bad? After all the “oh no’s,” and a bit of chaos that I’m sure occurred last week, here’s why you can breath easy.

For off, this is not the first time online media has had to adjust itself quickly to changes, and we all managed to survive that. For instance, when rich media was a newcomer more advertisers wanted rich media ads only to find out back in 2002 that most of the Internet users had dial-up. Meaning it would take forever and a day for a rich media ad to load (and I know I’m not the only one that remembers the pain of waiting for a web page to load). However, according to a study by Pew Internet and Life Project, from November 2003 to May 2004 high speed access grew by 42% among home users and rich media finally had a place to call home.

The other major reason not to freak out is, we already have something out there to fall back on…done guessing? The good old static banners, .gif animation or .gifs, anyway you spin it, they still exist and perform just as well.

Be creative, take one of your campaigns or products and promote it as a “Retro” campaign or going “Old School” and have fun with the static ads. People just might appreciate it more. Sean Caputo, VP of affiliate network Qclix.com explained to me, “We have found that the flash ads have been too intrusive on the internet user’s experience. Browsers like firefox have plugins to disable flash files and the new Microsoft explorer will have the same capabilities. People are spending more time learning to turn it off to read the webpage that they are looking for than the actual ad being played.”

So according to one of the larger affiliate networks out there you might be better off with a Retro campaign, but let’s say going “old school” since I like that better.

After all, old school campaigns can be tracked just as easily as flash, they are easier for publishers to implement into their systems, and I don’t know of one publisher in the Internet Universe that can’t run static creatives.

Believe it or not, ad agencies may have to think a bit harder now, and the copywriters will have their work cut out for them as well. Flash ads can actually get a pretty good size message into the creative. During the old school days you had to get your message across in probably 6-10 words or less and still keep the file size under control. It was almost like making a keyword search ad on Yahoo or Google into a static ad. If you can think of wording for those ads and stay within the limits, than you can definitely create a static ad.

Another option is email. It’s pretty easy to stay compliant with the CAN-Spam Act according to Jeff LeGore from Peak Advertising, LLC — Agency. He tells me that “most of the campaigns [Peak Advertising has] are flash ads, but those that are static convert well, and the email campaigns they have perform just as well. If one of their email campaigns was animated at the top it would be a bit more appealing but in the end the client still gets the information they are looking for from the user,” he says. “Most of our campaigns the user has clicked on because it is already of interest to them, the creative aspect then becomes secondary.”

According to recent articles, more publishers will support contextual links and streaming videos. Approximately 67% of publishers report being able to support contextual links up from about 50% last year, and more than 76% of publishers support rich media up from 69% last year. About 35% of publishers can support streaming video up from 25% last year, just to scratch the surface.

This is a great time to sit down with your ad agency or your in-house design team to come up with new ways or old school ways to get your message out there. There are still plenty of options out there and always new ones coming down the pipeline. Turn the flash disable chaos into a useful time to give your campaigns a new life.

Let’s not forget, static ads are also less time consuming to create and not nearly as pricey. In the end it’s all about the user. Our users are very smart and in some cases more tech savvy than us, lets give them what they want, simplicity and quickness. Let them look at an ad, find out what they need to know right then and there, and let them get on with their day and do whatever it is they went to the site to do.

Play to the user’s strengths such as, if it is a mom you are trying to reach, make the ad speak quickly. Moms don’t have time to sit and click and read all day, they need to know what it is you want them to buy in the time it takes for their kid to accidentally unplug the computer…but that’s a whole different story.

Never assume something is obsolete. It is bound to make a comeback when least expected.


(correction: the original version of this article noted issues regarding rich media company PointRoll workingon rectifyingits problemswithMicrosoft’sdisabled flash ads. This informationis false and has been removed from the edited version of the article.)



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