This past week, EyeWonder has been all a-buzz with the new release of our internals systems, reporting, and most importantly our Flash component tool AdWonder. The team did an absolutely phenomenal job gathering requirements, listening to what was important to our clients and the market at large, and coming up with some tools that will vastly improve workflow to the everyday EyeWonder process. A shining example of this, the new version of AdWonder is jam-packed with improvements. Some notable new features (supported by templates you can download as part of the full release):
Instream Products: create bugs, fixed roll, full-screen, and ticker formats without a whole lot of side-stepping. Design instream ads in flash to take advantage of the interactivity of the web.
Widgets: create widgets in flash and allow for full AdWonder tracking/reporting
Roadblocks: test 2 synchronized ad units in the same page
The biggest changes, however, are to the adWonder panel workflow itself. There are too many improvements to give them all justice here, but just to note a few:
Multiple Select is possible and encouraged for manipulating ads and videos
There is now a grid-type layout in order to see better lists
Several plans to filter and select based on ad and video properties
Campaign association to organize and work with your ads
Anyway, I am extremely impressed and excited to see this forward advancement. A big shout out to the team! In honor of them, I thought I’d post a photo of some of the team members (Meng, Kyle, and James with photo credit to Barbara). Thanks guys!
ps: you can download the release and see tutorials, release notes, etc. on unleashthewonder.com!
Sooo… here’s a little strange nugget of information we just discovered while loading in a .txt file into Flash content using loadVars.load(): the ActiveX Flash Player in IE 6 does NOT like GZIP compression and cache-control being set to no-cache from an HTTP request. Flash also doesn’t allow you to change the response type client-side, so the only solution is to change the host. We didn’t figure this out, this guy or gal did (thank you!). Also note - he’s specifically talking about XML here, but we also had this issue with plain Text files. Needless to say, the EyeWonder staging and live environments now take this into account, so load away with those txt files!
I realized recently that some of the same questions come up from component users over and over again, so while we make these things clearer in the UI, I thought I’d also remind people of two cool things about the AdWonder Component:
1. The Component version relates to the version of Flash Studio you are using, not to the swf version that you need to publish. For instance, if you are editing a file that will be published in Flash 8, but you are using the Adobe CS3 version of the Flash editing application, you will still be using AdWonder 9.1 (or whatever subrelease is currently available). AdWonder 8 is because we still support the use of Flash 8 for those of you who haven’t been able to get CS3 yet.
2. If you need to edit a bunch of different ads at once, open up the AdWonder panel and publish the ad through the tool. The correct copy of the main FLA and any additional FLA assets that are checked will open and stay open after publishing.
Its been a fantastic weekend for EyeWonder attendees here in Toronto at FiTC. The event was well-balanced, jammed full of fantastic presentations, and the parties were of course awesome. Some of the highlights:
Sneaks on Flash Media Server 3.0 - there are some innovations having to do with H.264 and stream switching which will drastically change the performance of our video ads. I can’t wait for us to start working with the new stuff. I also am interested to see how this affects some of EyeWonder’s recent work in the in-stream market.
Grant Skinner’s favorite things - I’ve seen Grant talk before, but he discussed some of his more experimental tactics. He’s always fantastic at explaining how he approaches things without overwhelming people. If you’ve never checked out his site - I highly recommend it (www.gskinner.com/blog), but it looks like he’ll also be posting conference notes here in the next few days.
2.5D vs. 3D discussions - there were three areas of note here - the 3d panel, Ralph’s solo presentation which was great (although I missed a little running late from lunch), and several sneaks in the Adobe keynote. Adobe showed some very cool future animation/tweening tactics to lower the entry level for creating 3d animation. The conference had a panel with several Adobe product managers as well as some of the smartest dudes around on the subject. One thing of note that I think is useful, for those of us in the advertising world, is the thought that you don’t have to spend all this time learning something like papervision if you don’t want to - often times creating a small animation and either exporting as a video or series of bitmaps will make more sense. Pro: 3D libraries for flash afford you are the ability to allow for interactivity, and also to save on bandwidth, Con: CPU usage for any vector-based animation is something you’ll want to consider carefully.
McDonald’s happy meal workflow - Julian is always really smart about presenting things that are both techy and practical, so it was fun to see how Fuel conquered their most recent cross-promotional endeavor with an international happy meal project. He discussed a lot about what technologies/tools they used to make internal communication and the final execution both successful and efficient, and I’d be surprised if a lot of folks didn’t walk away with the correct notion that they need to start using things like bugzilla and subversion to vastly improve their own team process.
That’s it for now - hopefully some of our agency friends will win some fun awards at the final event tonight - good luck everybody!
Recently, EyeWonder got even more press over a wicked cool ad that we worked on with Stinson Partners for their client, GE. GE had an ambitious, and very forward-thinking, notion to run branding ads related to their differing business objectives, and then on a Thursday afternoon, switch those ads dynamically to display an instantly-playing, live-steaming event within those ads to allow their CEO, Jeff Immelt, to communicate directly with stock investors.
There have been lots of press over this, but I’m sure for some of you more technically-inclined people, you’re wondering, “why is this a big deal - flash has had live streaming for a little while now?” Well, good question! I’ll tell you why:
Live streaming events are typically shown on websites. While at a platform level, there is no difference between a website using flash vs. a website running an ad using flash, it’s important to understand SCALE. Typically, large events would be considered a few thousand people. This ad served live streaming video to over 640,000 users for an hour-long event. To run a live event through an ad, you have to consider that your event may have to accommodate up to 100 times more concurrent users than a typical website event.
Akamai was fantastic during this whole process! EyeWonder and Akamai have been long-standing partners, but it’s just really exciting to see a partnership grow like this into something to be able to support this sort of event. Their infrastructure utilized the latest available version of Flash Media Server and they also helped us do loads of testing, retesting, and thinking through contingency plans. They, of course, also worked with Stinson and GE on the live encoding service. You have to remember that you’re not just supporting the video serving, you also need to think situationally about what happens on the encoding side. Akamai proved once again why they are leaders in the space.
Over 6000 questions were submitted to the interviewer during the live event. The clever solution to doing this quickly, efficiently, and without building out massive support behind the scenes was to use our EyeWonder send-to-friend feature. You can see some additional questions in the FAQ and the VOD version of the webcast here.
Overall, great work to everybody on the EyeWonder and Akamai teams and also congrats to Stinson and GE for creating and executing such an innovative, effective idea.
Michael Miraflor of Deep Focus has an insightful article on ClickZ today. While I agree with what Michael is saying, I have expanded on them below with the thinking that with the right rich media partner you’ll have a 360 view on your spaceship.
Going through his list, here are my comments on each:
Prevent sensory overload. Having the same rich media resized for 2, 3+ other banners running on the same is for the most part a good way to waste your media budget on excessive rich media serving fees. I’ve talked about it before in previous posts (and in conversations if we’ve ever met), but encourage cooperation not competition between rich media banners on the page. If you have a roadblock as part of the buy, why not take advantage of the fact that you know the ads will be served together and have them sync up. Two great examples of syncing the banner and removing the dueling are NG Galapagos - excellent video syncing and only using the 728×90 as the source for subsequent interactivity, and the FedEx Weather the Storm - which is a nice of knowing your placement and provide an engaging and memorable experience about the brand.
Cap your consumer. This really depends on the campaign and rather than frequency capping the exposures, I would recommend retargeting the user through fine-tuned messaging and especially for longer runs planning creative refreshes to keep the compelling nature of rich media ads available without letting the creative become stale.
Avoid flammable pages. Page burn is a new term for me, and while I like the phrase, I hate what it means. Check with your account person to have them pull information on placements in the plan or being considered. EyeWonder tracks average brand exposure time and average time before the first interaction. This information can help the media team decide which types of ads to run and help the creative team sharpen the executions with the length of intro animation and when the call to action is available. If users are typically only on Placement X on Site Y for 15 seconds, I would encourage you to display the CTA as soon as possible. In fact, just because the site allows 15 or 30 seconds of animation doesn’t mean you should take advantage of that or at least wait to display the CTA in the last few seconds. In addition to photo albums and slideshows, I would add sign out/in pages.
Know your folds. EyeWonder will cross-reference the media plan with our spec database and confirm when your ad is below the fold. If you have a placement that is running at the bottom of long-form content, you obviously needn’t worry much about the initial animation and more on an impactful call to action.
No, your other left. Again, we’ll cross-reference all this information for you, provide you spec matrix and confirm everything with the site. It’s unfortunate when an ad is served on the wrong side, but with EW’s traffic team to confirm the details and advancements in our technology like edge-detection expanding off of the browser’s viewport should become a rarity.
Dive into metrics. Why wait for the end of the campaign? Take advantage of the real-time metrics available to you and think about ways to tweak the ads for better performance and even tweak the plan by reallocating impressions from underperforming placements to the standouts getting all the ITR, CTR and interaction time love. Post-campaign analysis is super important for the media and creative team. Best practices are there for the taking and doing analysis over several campaigns can provide compelling trends to be shared internally and with your client for future rich media success.
This is a great video and very relevant to the world of online advertising.
How many moonwalking bears have you put into your rich media executions, only to see the interactions associated with them never exactly delivered as you had hoped? They are not always moonwalking bears, but I have seen my fair share of really amazing, compelling, engaging, interactive elements in a banner get ignored because of extraneous animation, graphics, copy, you name it.Plain and simple - users are not on the page to interact with your banner. If you can make sure whatever you are trying get them to interact with is apparent and not hidden, your campaign will go from meh to magnificent.
Show your call to action quicker - cut the copy down, remove frames from the animation and make it clear what you would like the user to do and what they will get for performing the action.
Mouseover for More sounds a lot less appetizing than Mouseover to take the quiz and to print a $5 coupon. Obviously I’m not a copywriter and you don’t need to rewrite the production brief, but clarity should not be a rarity for call to action copy.
I used to love the Where’s Waldo books when I was younger, but there is no better way to lose a potential user than hiding the call to action. It’s just not that much fun, nor is it very effective. All to often I see a button or some copy hidden away in a corner or camouflaged amongst crazy graphics that makes very little sense.
If you’ve got something as cool as a moonwalking bear, make sure you let the user know and don’t have them counting the number of basketball passes.
Even though many sites have become more progressive in what they allow from a file size perspective, we are constantly battling specs and working closely with designers and developers at agencies to optimize their Flash files to be within spec and not sacrifice the quality and overall concept of the banner execution.
One of our fantastic production designers and Component Support Specialists put together this list of tips for optimizing flash files. I know a few folks have already benefited from this info and although some of it may not be new to you, these are some great best practices to incorporate for future projects whether you are in a bind for a little more K size or not!
Thanks James for putting this together!
IMAGES AND ARTWORK
1. First off, check the quality settings of any bitmaps in your library. This is the prime culprit in most cases.
2. If your FLA has any complex vector artwork with lots of anchor points, see about optimizing it a bit.
FONTS
1. Check font embedding. If you have any dynamic or input text in your FLA, check to see which characters are being embedded.
2. Has any text been converted to vector outlines (this can add a lot to filesize)? If possible try to recreate the outlined text with the actual font
EXTERNAL FILES
1. Are there any class files or .as files being included? Check their file sizes and make sure you’re only including what you need.
2. Also, is there any content in your FLA that could be moved to a child/external FLA? Look for items in your movie that may not show up until after a user interaction or something like that. In most cases, it won’t help to move items into an external file if they must be loaded in the moment the ad begins to play - since many sites consider that part of the initial file size.
UNUSED ITEMS IN LIBRARY
1. Even if they’re not being used in your timeline, Flash components (buttons, combo boxes, etc.) in your library are still exported into the SWF when it’s published. Many times, removing these unused components drops file size considerably.
2. On the same note, check for any MovieClips that are being exported for runtime sharing. If you are no longer using them, turning off the linkage for that item might help lower file size.
UPDATE (3.19): Via Mike Downey’s blog and the latest info from Adobe’s CEO, it looks like it may be a little further off than originally hoped. We have faith in the Flash Player product team and can’t wait to see what (and when) they release the Flash iPlayer!
