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.
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!
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!
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:
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.
Man, I can’t believe it’s mid-November and I haven’t written since August. My most sincere apologies to those of you who stop by to see what’s new every once in awhile. I have been traveling pretty much non-stop to visit many of our clients, and also to attend a few Flash Conferences as well.
Some of the noted trips:
LA - got to spend a bunch of time over with Tequila - they are doing some super-cool stuff on the Nissan brand with Flash 9 and AS 3, which I’ll get to share with ya’ll next week. They are embracing the component in a major way - kudos to them for doing some pretty amazing stuff. Also Ayzenberg has started to use the component now - which is VERY exciting!
Adobe MAX - I agree with what Grant S. said about it - it’s a little bit more corporate and less personal than some of the more grassroots conferences, but wow the community is HUGE. There are a lot of cool things coming out with Adobe - most notably AMP (Adobe Media Player), a new version of Flash Media Server, and some pretty cool little side projects they have using AIR like Buzzword. AIR is growing up quickly, and now that you can export Flash projects into AIR applications directly in Flash, we’re probably going to start seeing lots and lots of AIR applications.
NY/DC - met some more of our fabulous agency partners and got to do a shortened best practices presentation for 80 creatives! It is definitely a little nerve wracking when you hop off a plane, speed into Manhattan, and then immediately walk into an 80 person presentation, but I guess there’s no better way to get over an early morning flight than that.
Dublin - London - Flash on the Beach - Dublin is officially my new favorite city. It’s friendly, the pubs are great, you can walk everywhere, and everybody drinks Guinness (it’s good for you, you know). We also have a really great new office there, which we share with some really cool dudes called MadDog Multimedia, so it’s exciting to see us expanding the way we are. I didn’t mention that I also got to go over to Germany recently to visit our new office in Cologne. I’ve got to learn German.
As I find the time, I’ll put up some more specifics on some helpful things I learned at Flash on the Beach as well so stay tuned. And I promise it won’t be 3 months from now.
For now, we have completed the Adobe+EyeWonder events, and man, what a ride! After a brief run-through at the Atlanta Adobe Experience Design group (thanks Michael Hagel), and several months of preparation from the EyeWonder and Adobe marketing teams (thank you to Adobe and EyeWonder marketing), Ryan and I made the journey to Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, in the span of three weeks to spread the word about unleashing the wonder with richer, cooler, newer advertising techniques.
Each of the events, venues, and attendees had their own flavor: Chicago - urban and contemplative, San Francisco - cloudy and cool outside, but warm and artsy inside, Los Angeles - sunny and chic, and New York - hip and crowded, as always :). Thanks to everyone who attended - it was really great to meet so many clients and partners, and thanks again to John Schuman, who spoke so intelligently on the great new integration points and features of Adobe CS3. Also, please check out a review on the New York event and various pics from New York and LA, as well as our warm-up round in Atlanta.
As a fairly new Mac user, I’m always discovering or learning new things from some of you Apple-veterans, but today I was alerted about this SUPER cool feature in the 10.4.8 release. Basically, press Control and then scroll up and down with two fingers on your trackpad (for laptop only obviously) and see what happens. Maybe ya’ll knew about this already, but I was blown away. This certainly would have been useful in the last three weeks of our EyeWonder-Adobe events!! By the way - stay tuned as we will be following up on those events as soon as possible…
EyeWonder ads work on Safari for Windows! Now your campaigns can still be viewed, edited, and tested with your new favorite browser for the PC. While this is just a provisional release while the browser is in beta, you can be assured that you’re not going to miss any of that small (but probably quickly growing) share of the market. Happy surfing!
There was a great article in ClickZ (that I missed earlier this month) from Dorian Sweet, following up from an article he wrote back in 2005.
He points out the rules for for executing an effective rich media ad can be broken up like a three-act play:
Act I: The Interaction Layer. This is where audience interest must be piqued. Elevate intrigue so the user wants to start playing with your premise.
Act II: The Engagement Layer. Your audience is involved as deeply as possible, playing with games, polls, photos, video, whatever. It should all be entertaining and not too indulgent. Attention spans aren’t getting any longer these days.
Act III: The Reward Layer. The audience wants a payoff for time spent, whether it’s a freebie, some bonus content, or an invite to a relevant e-mail newsletter. Make it a worthwhile reward. A cheap gift is as good as giving the user a chance to slap your brand in the face.
I won’t try to paraphrase, reword, or copy/paste any of his article because it is all so good — check it out here. Other than the Act I and II titles getting swapped in his article (not sure how that went to press), this is the approach we have been taking for years to ensure you reach your audience and execute your campaign objective.
<— My picture on iMedia which I do not love.
