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An advertising term used to describe the
latest generation of online marketing tools. Rich media advertising
generally relies on the use of flash, Java or streaming media
technologies to create advertisements that can contain sound, video and
animations rather than just static images. Prompted by the decline in
popularity and effectiveness of banners, advertisers have turned to
rich media in an attempt to boost flagging revenues and improve the
efficiency of their campaigns. According to DoubleClick, an advertising
research company, almost 25% of online adverts used some form of rich media
in the third quarter of 2002, generating responses ten times greater than
their traditional static counterparts.
Unlike banners and
pop-ups, which traditionally measure audience interest in terms of
clickthroughs to other websites, rich media adverts are designed
to intrigue and entertain as well as simply drive traffic. Some seek to
imitate television advertising by displaying digital video clips and
animations; others adopt an educational or interactive approach, allowing
people to explore the advert at their own pace. One problem with rich media
advertising is that it consumes considerably more bandwidth than the
simply gif images that constitute banners. Users of dial-up internet
connections routinely find that pages containing rich media take much longer
to load, prompting some cynics to speculate that such advertising is the
brainchild of isps determined to upgrade them to more expensive
broadband connections. |
