HTML5 Advertising Going Forward - HTML5 Advertising - page 321

Chapter 13

HTML5 Advertising Going Forward

As you know, advertising on the Web has been through many changes, from static images to animated GIFs to rich
media with Flash to present day HTML5. It's fair to say this was fueled by the dawn of affordable, web-centric mobile
devices and tablets—but what's to come? What other platforms will take advantage of the new open web standard?
This chapter will demonstrate the possibilities. HTML5 will eventually be everywhere a browser is: televisions,
appliances, game consoles, vehicles, set-top boxes, outdoor displays, billboards, screens in elevators and even in the
back of taxicabs—basically, every screen both indoors and out! Have you ever seen that movie Minority Report ? Yeah,
like that! Anywhere there's a browser and network access you'll see HTML5 and most certainly advertising.
HTML5 adoption is already omnipresent in our industry; soon every device and appliance will work on the same
technology as our desktop computers and mobile devices. This will be a huge paradigm shift in traditional media
buying because everything will become a “digital buy”. The walls between traditional and digital you currently see in
agencies will crumble, and you'll be able to gain the reach of broadcast with the measurement of digital. This will be
a huge disruption in the advertising industry; many new companies will emerge, and there will be many casualties.
Through user adoption, HTML5 will quickly bring ubiquity and continuity across all screens, allowing marketers to
develop a unified marketing message and measure ad campaigns much more effectively across channels. With this
knowledge, ad servers and data providers will soon be able to have a viewer/user fingerprinted (or tied) to a few TVs,
a game console, a tablet, a phone, and a desktop computer. With this sort of information, it's certain that privacy
concerns will arise because users' data will need to become much more protected. With all that said, let's look at
HTML5 advertising today and more importantly, going forward.

HTML5 Advertising Circa 2012
In 2012, HTML5 had a pretty big year. It has been through many changes, including a separation of specifications
from working groups ( http://w3.org/QA/2012/07/html5_and_htmlnext.html ) , additional features added to the
specification, removed features, and new browsers supporting various levels of compliance. However, you and I both
know that this is just the beginning because HTML5 has been a long time in the making.
Specifically, the developments of 2012 have brought much confusion to the advertising industry regarding how
to efficiently bring scale with this new way of ad development. Between businesses small and large, we as an industry
have a lot of improvements to make; in fact, don't think for a minute that just because a company is a Fortune 500
that it knows what it's doing in this realm. HTML5 is a huge, game-changing shift, and everyone both big and small
needs to adapt! Advertisers and marketers either are clueless on how to target users on the growing mobile landscape
or are just unsure that HTML5 (which is now more than a buzzword) is going to drastically impact their businesses
now and in the years to come. To better illustrate this, I've been compiling a list of questions I've heard in the past
year regarding HTML5 and advertising. Here are a few (and note that most of these questions came from director and
chief-level executives of huge web properties):

• “What is HTML5?”

• “How much does HTML5 cost?”