AdWonder Blog

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!

Erin made a quick mention about one of EyeWonder’s newest offerings - SocialWonder, but I wanted to fill you in on this new feature and why I think it is such addition to your already rocking rich media initiatives.

So many of the ads we have the opportunity to work on incorporate such rewarding content that is entertaining, educational, and/or promotional. What better way to empower the user to become an evangelist for your brand than allowing them to showcase their affinity on their social networking, blog or personal web page.

SocialWonder allows for users to easily post a rich media widget to their page. Once the widget is on the user’s page, their friends can interact with the widget and you as the marketer get all great reporting metrics you are used to seeing through your standard rich media campaigns  — not to mention the free publisher media impressions and a slightly different presentation via a user’s profile or webpage.

Not only is it easy for users to post directly to their page from the rich media ad, but this extensibility is extended to their friends. So not only can they interact with their friends widgets, but if the choose to they can post the widget on their personal social networking site. This can happen on over 20 of the top social networking sites or even copy and paste the code to their personal blog or website.

Click here or on the screenshot below to check out the demo:

While this is a proof of concept on what is possible, we are really excited to see how agencies and advertisers embrace this new technology and come up with ways to unleash the wonder through social networking.

Samsung with the help of Cheil USA is the first to test the waters with a campaign for one of the coolest new music phones, the Juke  (I will post a link to their creative when I get the word internally). Several other groups have projects in the works, which will be sure to post for you to check out.

Got a campaign that may be right for SocialWonder? Ping your EyeWonder rep and let us know what you are thinking!

If you are curious, you can view the press release, and check out press coverage for SocialWonder from Adotas and ClickZ.