AdWonder Blog

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!

According to several different sources, Apple is planning on supporting Flash in the near future. Rich Media+iPhone = Magic… ?

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!

Last month Adobe released their latest Flash Player Version Penetration numbers. Check out how far Flash 9 has come along:

Our latest numbers tell a similar story (as they have since we began cross-referencing):

• 94% - Flash 9+
• 97% - Flash 8+
• 97% - Flash 7+

We like to keep a close tab on these numbers for two reasons:

1. keep our clients up to date on the latest numbers, so they can feel comfortable using the latest technologies available
2. compare and verify our internal reporting numbers against Adobe’s

So, with Flash 9 hovering around 94-96% — why are you still publishing for anything less? Flash 10 was showcased at MAX in the Fall and is about to be released in beta, but I still hear from agencies who are saying they have to publish for 7 (and even a few that say they are still publishing for 6 - eek!?!). Let’s look at the two main concerns I hear from folks who are stuck in yesteryear:

1. The site requires Flash 6/7/8 - EyeWonder has a fantastic group of folks that are constantly working with our publishing site partners to ensure we have the latest specifications and helping educate the sites’ ad ops teams on the latest and greatest of the technology we use. There is not a single site in our massive publisher network, where we cannot run your Flash 9 creative.
2. My client requires Flash 6/7/8 - This can be a little trickier, but we are happy to provide you our latest internal numbers (see above) to show them what the penetration of Flash 9 is compared to their preferred player version. Of course, if they are kicking it old school with a Flash 6 player it may be time for an intervention and an upgrade (just kidding, well kind of). Oftentimes I have seen the push for an upgrade come from the agency’s novel concept that requires the use of the latest and greatest Flash player…plus it doesn’t hurt that sites like at least two of the top 10 websites (YouTube and MySpace) require Flash 9.

Most of you know this, but when a user has an older version of the Flash player than what the EyeWonder creative was published for, they will receive an alternate or failover ad. For those ~5% of users, most of the time this is a JPG or GIF, but sometimes we will serve a standard SWF. EyeWonder’s technology works on more browsers and operating system configuration than any other rich media provider I have seen, which is a testament to our development team and our quality assurance department.

Since CS3 shipped in May, we have seen some fantastic executions taking advantage of Flash 9’s features, several of which have been highlighted here and in our monthly newsletter. So with part of 2008 already behind us, what are you waiting for?

When you do come up with something especially cool, let me know and also be sure to submit it to our EyeWonder Creative Awards.

So it’s been a month, and I’m finally able to start reviewing my notes from Flash on the Beach. There were tons of inspiring sessions and interesting people, and Brighton is really a super-cool town. I don’t want to write yet another review, since you can see more qualified thoughts and wrap-ups like these all over the place:

http://theflashblog.com/?p=302

http://www.jonnymac.com/blog/

http://swfoo.com/?p=157

http://www.rockonflash.com/blog/?p=84

http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2007/11/conference_reca.html

As everybody else said - the speakers were amazing. Lots of really unbelievable work, including some non-”flashers” (or probably more like ex-flashers) like Robert Hodgin and Rob Chiu, who were really intelligent, creative, and inspiring. From a rich media perspective, there was certainly a lot to take in, although mostly in the form of tools we can start thinking about incorporating into our own releases, as well as cool stuff you can start thinking about doing in your campaigns.

A few ideas:

Particles (Seb Lee-Delisle’s crash course) - I never really thought about how much cool stuff you can do with some really basic math. When I get a few minutes, I might post a few ideas.

PaperVision3d - I know Ryan and I have been talking about it for awhile, but there are starting to be a few really cool interactive ways to incorporate this sort of technology into an ad to make it a REAL 3d experience (instead a video which uses 3d effects).

AIR apps - With the word “widget” currently overtaking the internet, it’s cool that there is now a platform that will allow you, with the tools you already know, to create desktop applications. Lee Brimelow did a great talk on how to quickly create AIR apps, and while a little branding widget may not be taking advantage of all the cool stuff AIR can do, it’s certainly convenient on the production side of things! We just released a product called SocialWonder, which will allow you to post online widgets through EyeWonder ads, but what about a downloadable little thingymibobber as well?

Nifty FMS ideas - Lisa Larson did a great session about cool FMS applications like games, communications, chats, etc. There are certainly lots of innovative ways to apply some of those things to your campaign - virtually limitless possibilities as long as we are still considering challenges in audience scalability.

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