With 2005 drawing to a close, it’s time for the interactive advertising year in review. If you’re like me, you can’t remember what happened in July let alone way back in January, particularly where interactive marketing trends are concerned (have you noticed that there’s a considerable amount of overlap with these sorts of things?). With that in mind, I thought I’d offer a month by month recap of the units, formats, and channels that made this a watershed year for interactive marketing.
h3. January: Vlogs
Given the popularity of blogs in 2004, we had to expect the trend would continue this year. The newest blogs, however, were a lot richer. Video blogs (blogs that incorporate video clips) made their presence known this year, thanks to vlogs like Peter Jackson’s “Kong is King”:http://www.kongisking.net/index.shtml. They’re sure to continue to flourish, thanks to distribution channels like multimedia search engines.
h3. February: Podcasting
Podcasting ended up being big all year long, but February “saw the introduction of the world’s first podcasting ad network”:http://www.clickz.com/experts/media/media_buy/article.php/3483571. Just think how much our “options have expanded”:http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113167835201394489-6RLXo50JXniwqPt59a3cCUJPXsM_20061111.html?mod=blogs) since then.
h3. March: Online Video
After the Superbowl, which brought with it a number of TV ads that subsequently found audiences online (remember “GoDaddy?”:http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/superbowl05/landing.asp?isc=wscfwst304&se=%2B), marketers took a longer, harder look at online video. Can you think of a current online campaign that doesn’t include it?
Category: Rich Media
I’ll be speaking to my class about Online Advertising tonight and we’ll be touching on Rich Media ad formats. I was going to show them my standard examples (mostly from vendor showcases) but I thought I’d ask for a little input from you folks.
Do you have any sites or vendor showcases that do a good job of showing the possibilities of rich media ads? I’m thinking specifically of IAB standard rich media stuff – not cool Flash sites and the like.
What do you point people to when they want to see great rich media ads?
The proliferation of online video ads makes me wonder how consumers (and, of course, marketers) ever lived without them. According to the results of “ComScore Media Metrix’s Online Video Ratings”:http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=630, more than 94 million people in the US alone watched a streaming video online in June. That represents over half of the total US online population.
Apparently, the average consumer watches an astounding 73 minutes of streaming video content per month. “This research confirms that streaming video is now part of the Web experience for a broad base of consumers,” said comScore Media Metrix president Peter Daboll. “This technology is changing advertising on the Web, by allowing richer, more emotive connections between brands and consumers.”