HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Rich Media
As advertisers increasingly asked for more creativity and measurement from their online ad campaigns, a new form
of online advertising was required—Rich Media Advertising. Since online ads were pretty much static in the early
Web, the arrival of interactivity, rollovers, and expanding ad experiences met with real popularity and rapid adoption
in the advertiser market, which saw them as bringing a new, much-needed window for creative reach and a way to
effectively measure online success.
On the other hand, the media vendors saw this as a shift in the way advertising was created, bought, and sold
in the space. As you may guess, early rich media ads were developed using traditional HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
techniques. Figure
2-1
shows the very first Rich Media ad—for the movie Erin Brockovich, created and served by the
Figure 2-1.
The first Rich Media ad
Things have changed a bit since then, of course, but in the online space at the time, this was truly
groundbreaking. For the first time a user could roll over the ad unit and have it expand to a much more robust
experience. The traditional Call to Action (CTA) for “click here” was revamped to display “mouse this ad”, inviting
users to interact by simply rolling over the ad unit to get more content. It's also helpful to note that even in the
demonstration environment, there are messages to handle the browser differences and inconsistencies. In most
cases, if you could not see the rich ad experience, the ad server company served you a static or a default ad instead
(see Figure
2-2
).
Figure 2-2.
The first Rich Media ad's backup static or default ad
The ad-serving platform would be smart enough to determine whether or not the user could render the ad in
its rich form by using what was called the “user has” rule. This technique analyzed the user's system and browser
