Flash, Mobile and Advertising

Posted by on Thursday, April 29, 2010 · 2 Comments 

I’ve been tracking a package via FedEx today – my long awaited iPad 3G shipped and should be here tomorrow and it got me thinking about several things. First, I’m excited about the possibilities in magazine content coupled with a fantastic online experience. The joining of clean layouts and dynamic content brings a whole slew of opportunities for both publisher and advertiser. And although many publishers are hoping the device can save outdated business models focused on print, my firm opinion is this will not be the case. If you have an outstanding online strategy already, mobile hardware devices bring new ways to connect and interact on users terms, but any one device is not going to salvage poor business planning.

So over the past few years, we’ve been mobilizing all our web sites in one form or another and will continue to push to enhance our efforts here. Since the iPad has a large screen, it has made me pause in whats the best approach now for this device in the short term. If you re-direct a web client from the iPad to a mobile site better optimized for Droid, iPhone or RIM – this does not make much sense; you would miss out on the iPad’s immersive touch technology and graphics among other things. To display the standard site, it appears there is not going to be Flash on any iPad anytime soon (read Steve Jobs public post on the matter).

So currently we’re stripping out several Flash elements from Design World and re-tooling to display on mobile devices and be more SEO friendly, but this leaves Flash banner advertising an open issue. Users browsing on non Flash enabled devices will not be able to view Flash advertising – or at a minimum will only get a failover image. I know some users probably welcome that outcome, but thats another story. Our ad server is capable of handling very large Flash files, but much smaller animated GIF files – so trying to reduce a GIF down on a catchy banner ad looks like crap. Now, there are work-around for this, but we do not always directly recommend. Flash is a great tool- albeit overcomplicated to do simple things at times – but provides advertisers a powerful way to deliver messages. But it appears there is no apparent replacement or alternative to Flash ads. It seems the conversation is pretty quiet when it comes to this. My reaction to the whole Flash mobile issue is to advocate non-Flash ads betting on the adoption of Apple products. So then the technology work around and implementation falls back on the publisher to accomodate – a good problem to have in my book.

My iPad better get here soon, we have a lot of work to do.

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  • http://www.creativepartnersgroup.com Greg Sparkman

    As usual, DesignWorld is ahead of the pack on recognizing the trends for online publishing. Kudos. As the owner of a full service ad agency I’ve also been pondering the dichotomy of the Flash issue. Flash has been the only game in town for rich media ads, yet HTML5 standards are definitely the way to go for future web development. This leaves advertisers and ad delivery companies left in the gray, transitional zone. Advertising is the only reason I would consider the use of Flash on the web at this point, but I have to defer to the publishers and ad servers to define the rules for submission of HTML5 ad materials. Unlike the packaged .swf Flash file, we now have a bundle of assets (html, js, css, png) that would make up an HTML5 rich media ad. How will the likes of DesignWorld want to have those provided? I’d very much like to hear your thoughts on this because I am really interested in the direction this is taking.

    As an aside, I fully approve the move away from Flash, a proprietary resource hog, which a large number of the audience block via browser plug-ins.

  • Marshall Matheson

    Hi Greg – don’t have all the answers, but appreciate the feedback. On the ad server front, for the time the lock is on for image based and Flash, but we can also take a number of 3rd party tags and have been testing some XML type formats – all which point to being able to deliver dynamic non-flash assets. We’ll be sure to post updates here when we reach those milestones. Currently we are also underway with our new mobile video platform that ties into our mobile strategy and iPad / Tablet plans.

    Best
    Marshall