RICH MEDIADigital Interactive media

Definition of Rich Media:

The advertisements with which users can interact in a web-page format are rich media. They may appear in ad formats such as banners and buttons, as well as transitional‘s (interstitial‘s) and various over the- page units such as floating ads, page take-overs, and tear-backs.

Rich Media refers to the utilization of various technologies to enhance a recipient’s experience. It uses advanced technology such as streaming video, flash to interact instantly with the user, also the term of rich media is not easy to define, and all the rich media technologies generally exhibit at least some of the following characteristics:

  • Allow for advanced animations,
  • Support audio/radio in the advertising,
  • Instant user interactions, etc.

The defining characteristic of rich media is that the media element exhibits dynamic motion and this motion can occur over time or in response to an interaction with the user too.

To define in simple words, Rich media banners are flash creative that employs images, text, sound, and video. They won’t be necessarily interactive but are often interactive. It includes features like inviting the user to play a game, navigate through different “pages”, turn the sound on/off, select an item from a drop-down, pause the video and so on. Also, another big feature that a rich media banner has is, it can use several other technologies such as Java, JavaScript, and DHTML too.

Seven Features of RICH MEDIA:

  1. Highly Interactive i.e. it exhibits dynamic motion
  2. It includes audio and video
  3. Higher-quality content
  4. It can also include flash games in the banner that can be played by the user
  5. The size of the file is generally heavy; the size depends upon the creativity it holds
  6. Technically advanced and engaging
  7. It’s capabilities make advertising even more useful, letting a viewer interact with an ad and learn about a brand without having to leave the page they’re on

RICH MEDIA IN DIGITAL ADVERTISING:

Rich media in digital advertising is like a boon to digital marketers or say, advertisers, all the advertisers make use of rich media for introducing their brand, products, services or special offers with video, audio and some user interaction as it brings more attention of users towards the Ad. The rich media technology plays a smarter role here leaving a much better impact on users than banner ads. Adding to rich media, rich content is equally important in digital advertisng to make a dent on your target audience.

There are many pros and cons that rich media has but the main advantages of rich media over standard banners are:

  • IMPACT – Due to its richness and highly interactivity rich media leaves a greater impact on users, rich media ads are generally more engaging and thus chances of getting a conversion are more.

  • VISIBILITY – Visibility of the ad on a page becomes more due to its interactivity and thus it is properly visible on a webpage and thus grabs the attraction of a user, plus visibility increase more as the message can be shown in divide way(step by step)
  • HIGHER CONVERSION RATERich media ads have generally higher conversion rate due to its attraction towards the users
  • HIGHER ACTION-RATE – Action rate is the percentage of interactions that incurred an additional activity. It is always higher in the case of rich media
  • HIGHER INTERACTION RATE – It is the percentage of users who interacted with an ad unit in some way
  • EXTERNAL FEATURES – With rich media, we can do almost all kinds of tracking, like engagements, time duration, survey addition, etc. we can track all the activity done by the user on the ad. We can also add external elements like a map, video from other servers, twitter feeds, etc.
  • SOCIAL BOOKMARKS – Social networking is also a great way to promote, rich media ads are also handy for this feature, we can add social sharing like Facebook, LinkedIn, pin interest and can also add other features like showing off live twitter feeds using XML.
  • REPORTING – To know the success rate of the ad or campaign we do need data, and rich media is rich in providing all kind of data too
  • INTERACTIVITY – Highly interactive
  • WORKS WITH ANY AD SERVER
  • FAST, PAINLESS modifications, even on live ads
  • VIDEO INTEGRATION is possible for creative concepts.

COMMON RICH MEDIA ADVERTISING METRICS:

  • Dwell rate – The percentage of users exposed to a given piece of rich media content or advertising who interact with that content moving their cursors over it (but not clicking).

  • Interaction rate – The percentage of the audience that engages with the ad unit.

  • Interaction time – The number of time users spends engaging with the ad.

  • Display time – How long on average the ads were displayed on the web page.

  • Expansion rate – This metric is used for expandable ads, the ad expansion rate is the ratio of ad expansions to the number of ad impressions.

  • Video views and completions – The start and finish rate for video ads, starts and completions data can provide important information on levels of user interest

  • Average video view time – Another way to gauge the popularity of video ads with viewers is to compare the average length of play with the total length of the ad

  • Video pauses, rewinds, mutes – some rich media tracking systems also enable advertisers to track actions like pause, replay, mute, etc.

  • Close – Close event is also tracked as it helps in calculating the expansion or dwell rate

  • Custom events – Internal tracking, mouse over, downloads, etc.

COMMON RICH MEDIA TYPES:

 TYPE                                                ABOUT/DESCRIPTION

EXPANDABLE
These are the ones which expand when a user moves his mouse over the ad or clicks to interact with it, they also come in pre-expandable format i.e. when the page loads the ads are seen in expanded form

IN-PAGE 
A rich media ad that has functionality within the same ad (file, it does not expands or anything), like games, animation, video, forms or brochures. In-stream, media are part of In page units

FLOATING
The ads that appear as a layer on the top of the webpage , these are called floating ads as they float above the webpage and do not have any base ad like a collapsed unit of expandable banner

TRANSITIONAL
/INTERSTITIAL
These ads play in the main browser window between two pages of a website. When a user clicks on a link, they are taken to the advertising page, instead of the page they requested. They usually have small file size and are not pre-cached

TAKEOVER
The ads that replace all or part of a publisher’s web page with advertising content, they are often designed to look as if they are breaking or otherwise interacting with webpage content

POP-UPS
Ads that launch a new smaller browser window that appears above the open page, it launches automatically on page load

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN STANDARD BANNER AND RICH MEDIA:

 S.No.STANDARD BANNERRICH MEDIA
1.Standard banners are simple banners of gif, jpeg or flash. They usually include text with a visual such as a logo or a graphicRich media are that ad which has an audio/video in it, i.e. rich with its behavior
2.Less in size, advantageous when the purpose is only brandingHeavy file size
3.Lessor almost no interactivity i.e. STATICHighly interactive i.e. DYNAMIC
4.No other technology can be used with standard bannersRich media can synchronize with technologies like Java, JavaScript, DHTML also
5.These only have one interaction i.e. on the click it leads to an advertiser landing pageIt can have a number of interactions

EXAMPLES:

IN-Page Ad (Instream Ad) – 300×250 ad which has a video running on the same ad unit.

Expandable Ad – 300×250 collapsed unit expands to larger size

FLOATING Ad –

7 thoughts on “What is Rich Media?”

  1. An excellent primer on rich media- thanks for creating this blog. However, you need to fix the several punctuation errors- so many it becomes distracting and may prevent others from sharing on social media. Specifically, remove all the apostrophes in the piece. Using Grammarly or review of The Chicago Manual of Style on apostrophe usage might be useful.

    1. Hey Jeff,

      Totally with you, there are some posts which are quite old and the bad part of ours is we never went back to make the amendments. Thank you for bringing this up. Have updated this one with all grammatical issues but would re-look at all the older pages to get the Grammers and English rectified if any.

      Regards,
      kOA

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