Rich Media – Interactive flash ads displaying over the content pages. It supports sound and video and has the size dimensions up to 640×480. This format allows to reach the high effectiveness of commercial advertising.
To avoid the confusion, Rich Media is both a media and technology. As the media it is a whole class of new placement options: pop-up images coming from the corners, expanding images in many different ways, creatures running around the screen and many others. All these advertising materials require the use of advanced technologies (such as Flash). They can occur in a variety of formats, but only a couple of basic ones we will describe below).
If your ad campaign is focused on high conversion and not on a huge cold traffic, then you should be interested in attracting not some accidental visitors but your target audience. This contributes to rich media advertising, preparing visitors as much as possible before sending them to the advertiser. The interactiveness of such ads play the main role in the success of Rich-media banners. If you want to know more about the benefits of Rich Media and the difference of it with Standard ads, click here.
Teaser- Reminder- Main movie
Typical Rich Media module consist of three parts:
– Teaser – This is short, vivid snippet that attracts a lot of attention. It appears immediately after downloading a page and shows for 2-3 seconds.
– Reminder – This little animated block is placed in a noticeable place of the page, but does not interrupt from previewing the site.
– The main movie – This is a conclusion of advertising message. In this part, there is info of an advertiser’s site, purchasing options, or other forms of interaction with the user.
Depending on the tasks that need to be achieved, there can be displayed different parts of Rich-Media.
Rich Media examples
Here are the following examples of Rich Media ad units:
Floating Banner Ad Unit
Ad unit, which utilizes fixed ad placement technology. The characteristics of floating ad units include having a fixed position on the screen, disappearing when the user is scrolling and reappearing when stopped. It engages the consumer without disrupting browsing. This type of banner has appeared to bypass the restrictions of browsers’ pop-up blocking.
Expandable Banner Ad Unit
The main feature of this ad unit is expansion. It starts out expanding to 300×250 sized ad and automatically collapses after 5 seconds to 300×50 ad.
Expandable Banner Ad Unit with Video
This banner ad unit differs from Expandable Ad Units by dimensions (expands from 300×50 to 300×300) and the fact that with such ad you can see video playing, after which the user is directed to the native video player.
Interstitial Interactive Ad Unit
The interstitial ad unit are used in applications, through playing a game. The ad unit will then give the user the option to click out to video, or visit the advertisements landing page.
Prestitial (Pre Roll) Interactive Ad Unit
This is a full screen ad unit, which you can often see on websites before getting the access to website’s content . The viewer can either continue to the site or interact with the video. Once the user engages the ad unit, options will appear to watch additional videos within the ad unit or visit the website.
The common idea with Rich Media ads is that they come through two main stages: display and activation. Display stage is when you enter a site and there is the ad residing in some ad space. The second stage is when user decides to interact with an ad “activating” the idea of an ad and replying to its CTA.
Choose the best
In general, Rich Media uses advanced technologies to show a dynamic interaction between user and advertiser, leaving a deep impression to the users. Different types of Rich Media are currently used with different frequency. Some of them are used more often, while others are still in experimental stage. It’s smart to choose proper type of online Rich Media according to the special needs, requirements, the message or impression you want to give to users in different case etc.
Photo credit: IntelFreePress via Foter.com / CC BY
