Happy 5th Birthday EW+AIM
Today I made my debut as an author on iMedia Connection; you can read the full article here. The piece discussed general best practices and things to keep in mind about planning and creating Rich Media Advertising for IM clients. In putting this article together, I realized that before recently, there were few opportunities for really advertising anywhere other than banner ad placements.
<— My picture on iMedia which I do not love.
Almost exactly 5 years ago, AOL ran their very first rich media client campaign in AIM, and they continued to work with us exclusively for quite a while after that. The ad was for “Elf” with Will Farrell - a new release ad, and while extremely simple, it proved to be incredibly effective. Interesting tidbit - in the early days, AIM even ran with audio at certain times of days. While this is pretty much accepted as a faux-pas now, the AIM team was able to take some risks and experiment with what worked. This was also truly a ground-breaking adventure for other reasons - not just because of the unique format and placement, but where else could you target the crap out of the ad if you wanted and still reach a HUGE audience who is, arguably, already engaged in your surrounding content. This type of ad, while seemingly small, packs a lot of punch and you can run that ad now on MSN, MySpaceIM, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, and AIM with little fuss. Standardizing this process and finding ad processes that will get the best response for this sort of purchase has continued to refine and deepen over the last 5 years. There are very few places in the online world where you can buy just a few placements, create just a few ads with AdWonder, and get the kind of audience and response you can get with IM applications.
We’ve learned a lot about how to get campaigns of that magnitude up and going quickly, which as little inefficiency as possible, and now we will able to apply it to other mediums. Widgets, facebook apps, in-stream ads, and maybe even set-top boxes will start to need a standard way of operating and planning for, and then they will start to need best practices. I’m excited to see where these other things go!