October 24th, 2008

New York Times rolling out HD video content with Brightcove

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:21 am

Categories: Advertising, Brightcove, Rich Media

Tags: New York Times Co., Brightcove, Video, Andy Plesser, Andy, Corporate Communications, Portals, Branding, Marketing, Internet

Andy Plesser has the scoop that the New York Times has launched a new HD video portal using Brightcove’s service, something I’ve covered recently. With news that the New York Times is in trouble, this couldn’t come at a better time. Online video continues to explode in popularity and it’s becoming arguably the best way to reach new audiences and keep those audiences engaged. The New York Times doesn’t have a brand problem or even a content problem, but newspapers just haven’t been adapting well to the web. Video is one way to counter that.

The New York Times is using the new platform which allows for dynamic streaming so that users get the best quality video stream that their bandwidth allows. The portal looks like it has a lot of great content across all of the New York Times’ categories. They look like they’re using preroll ads. With the impressive brand of the New York Times, advertisers could be more than happy to jump in and advertise on the site, especially with the economic downturn looming. This is a good move for the Times and another indication of rich media becoming more important in every facet of content creation.

October 8th, 2008

AdSense for Games: Could RIAs be next?

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:23 am

Categories: Advertising, Flash, Google

Tags: Google Inc., Advertisement, Rich Internet Application, Google AdSense, Games, Personal Technology, Ryan Stewart

Google today announced a public beta for AdSense for Games. What’s unique about it is that it’s primarily targeted at Flash games with partners like Mochi Media, Konami, Heavy Games and others. This is significant for a number of reasons. First, because the online casual game market is growing quickly. According to Google’s blog post 25% of internet users play games every week. But perhaps more importantly this is really the first time that AdSense has been incorporated into Flash. Google has built in hooks that allow content creators to show contextual advertising at the beginning, the end, or in between levels.

Using AdSense inside of RIAs has been all but impossible until now. Scribd had a hack that allowed them to show AdSense inside of their Flash-based iPaper but beyond that there haven’t been a lot of good examples of using AdSense inside of RIAs. In fact advertising inside of rich Internet applications is something that continues to be difficult to do based on the current web model. Matthew Johnson from blist has some good thoughts on this.

My hope is that AdSense for Games can be a driver for helping bring together Google’s advertising platform into the new real-time RIA experiences on the web. It continues to amaze me that a platform like Flash which is so much a part of advertising on the web has yet to really find away to incorporate that advertising in its applications.

August 18th, 2008

NBA looking to stream live games

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 5:09 pm

Categories: Advertising, Online Video, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, User Interface

Tags: Web, NBA, Channel Management, Games, TVs, Tv & Home Theater, Marketing, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment, Ryan Stewart

Rich media on the internet could be getting another big win if the NBA decides to go through with its plan to stream games to people in local markets. The NBA isn’t the first sports league to stream live games, MLB offers a streaming package and the NFL is going to stream some of their national games that are slated for NBC, but this is the first time that local games would be streamed. Traditionally local games are the crown jewels of local television stations because they’ve basically got a monopoly.

Just as with the Olympics, this could be an interesting experiment to see how a blend of traditional media and new media can affect ratings. As we saw with the Olympics, traditional media still rules the advertising roost. It draws the most viewers, it pulls in the most money, and it isn’t going away any time soon. But increasingly content seems to be moving to a “consume it how you want it” model where big content creators (if you can attach that term to the NBA) offer a variety of ways to consume content. I’ve called these “touch points” in the past but always talked about them in terms of the web. Now big media companies are getting into the touch point game.

In the end, this kind of thing is great for the web. It’s the first step in blending the TV and web experiences. A lot of people focus on interactive TV as a next step, but it seems to be moving more in the web direction. People like their TV the way it is, but with the technologies on the web, you can create that interactive content and increase the granularity of your analytics. I think the web-based TV experience will end up being superior than the general TV experience because of RIAs and better data. Keeping it on the big screen is still important but ultimately the web provides better platforms with which to make the most out of video content. I hope other sports leagues follow suit.

July 28th, 2008

Interactive agencies, RIAs, and the advertising market

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:02 am

Categories: Advertising, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Advertisement, Nike Inc., Agency, Media, Rich Internet Application, Advertising & Promotion, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

There’s a pretty good article in AdAge today about the online display market and how it isn’t gaining as much traction as all of the hype would assume. In fact, with the economy starting to decline, AdAge says that the display market is getting hit harder than traditional media. The reason is largely because traditional media (TV, print, and radio) simply gets more reach. And that’s partly because the traditional media is better for branding content than online ads have been so far.

I’ve long felt that rich Internet applications and the online advertising market are deeply intertwined. Not necessarily on the pure display ads side of things, but as a way to build brand and deliver more pure forms of advertising online. AdAge brings up the quintissential example: Nike Plus.

More marketers are creating their own media and their own consumer experiences. Nike Plus, of course, is the perennial example of marketing taking an advertising budget and creating a real-world utility that essentially becomes proprietary media.

I’m excited to see more companies jump in and create experiences like Nike Plus that cater very heavily to a brand and bring with it all of the various aspects of the “lifestyle” you’d want. In Nike Plus’ case, those are things like exercise, fitness, and achieving goals. The added community aspect makes it easy to share (and in theory, keeps you on track).

The Roles of Agencies
One impact of this new advertising medium is going to be increased importance of agencies and development shops. R/GA did the Nike Plus site and were able to use their skills in the interactive world to create a high quality branded experience. By all accounts, the Nike Plus site has been a big success. As other companies look into creating something similar, it will be the agencies with strong interactive ties that benefit and perhaps lessen the importance of the pure advertising agencies. RIA skills will be in even more demand and being able to completely customize and design an RIA will be an important skill set.

I’ve still got a lot of faith that advertising on the internet is the holy grail. It’s easier to track, easier to change campaigns, and it’s more global. We just don’t have the right hooks or techniques yet to make the jump. But the more experimentation we get the better. I think the hype is well-deserved.

July 14th, 2008

Microsoft as the gate keeper of video analytics

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:57 am

Categories: Advertising, Microsoft, Silverlight

Tags: Olympic Games, NBC, Windows Media, Analytics, Video, Microsoft Corp., Web Browser, Microsoft Windows, Digital Media, Digital Music

There’s a post over on TechCrunchIT about how NBC is going to use Silverlight and the Olympics to do some audience research around how people consume digital media. Basically NBC has a ton of content that will come from the Olympics and they’re planning on providing it in a number of different ways including in the browser, on the regular television set, and on mobile phones. I’ve also heard they’re providing a feed or stream directly into Windows Media Player so you could watch it on your desktop.

NBC and Microsoft now have a huge test segment and a number of different ways to slice it. What makes Microsoft so interesting is that with Windows Media as the baseline, they can deploy a ton of different experiences and then deploy more targeted advertising based on the platform. They’ve got Windows Mobile, they’ve got Zune for devices, they’ve got Xbox for television, they’ve got Silverlight in the browser, and they’ve got Windows Media Player on the desktop. They are pretty much alone as the company that can distribute the same basic video file and provide that many different touch points. Update: a reader just sent me this press release that says Wave will be providing a desktop experience around the Olympics through Media Center.

I don’t think they’ll be rolling all of those things out for the Olympics, but since we’re in the infancy of digital media, Microsoft has a lot more room to test than other companies. I think it will also be interesting to see how Microsoft treats the HTML5 video spec. Because the spec essentially leaves it up to the browser to choose the codec, all of those Windows machines would more than likely be using Windows Media. That could give Microsoft more marketshare in the browser than they have now with Flash being the major player for digital media.

June 19th, 2008

Practice Fusion shows off "Google Apps" for doctors

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:51 pm

Categories: Advertising, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, Patient, Practice Management App, Ryan Stewart

Practice Fusion, a SaaS and ad-driven set of applications targeted at the medical market has just released a a suite of applications that they’re billing as “Google Apps” for doctors. I’ve written about Practice Fusion before and how it’s a really great example of an RIA that’s aimed at the field of medicine. As part of the suite today they’re releasing a Practice Management app, a Scheduling app, Secure Email, and Patient Management. Four tools that are indispensable for doctors.

The practice management app seems to be the hub of the suite. It’s what the doctor first sees and allows them to control and manage most part of their jobs. They can view patient data, communicate between staff, and look at a list of who has paid their bills. The scheduler is a pretty standard scheduling application but it provides automatic notifications to patients and lets you view the schedules for everyone in the office in one screen. The secure email lets doctors send messages to staff without having to go through typical email channels which can be subject to spam or other nonsense. Finally, the patient management lets you see all of your patient data in one place where you can adjust and make changes to any record which then occurs across the system - even with other doctors who are looking at that patient. It lets you quickly collaborate and add information to patients in a way that’s valuable.

I continue to like Practice Fusion’s business model. I think the medical field is one of the more lucrative areas that can benefit heavily from a dose of RIA. The fact that Practice Fusion uses Flex is also cool for me as an Adobe evangelist but I think the stuff they’re doing goes beyond any one technology. They’re showing how you can offer a free, valuable service to an industry in need of a solution. They’ve wrapped that solution in a great rich Internet application with quality user interface, good deployment, and easy access.

June 18th, 2008

Analytics in rich Internet applications and measuring success

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:35 am

Categories: Advertising, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Advertisement, Analytics, Rich Internet Application, Site, Financial Planning, Finance, Ryan Stewart

Via InsideRIA I found a blog post by Robert Hoekman Jr talking about some of the common myths of analytics today. It’s a pretty good look at what people really want to accomplish when it comes to “success” on the web. If you’re a news site then page views is a perfectly fine metric by which to judge whether or not you’re doing a good job. But if you’re building a web application, as Robert notes, that’s not always the best measuring stick:

If your site is a web application, the number of page views might be completely irrelevant because 50% of the actions on the site are performed on a single screen. In that case, information on individual files and data requests and click patterns will be more meaningful.

So what are the legions of statistic minded technologists to do now that RIA technologies have taken away the page view as a metric, how do we measure success on the web? Steve Rubel wrote the most poignant post about how we need to move beyond the page view ad figure out something else. He nails it at the end of his post:

As the page view platform crumbles, there’s going to be a shake out. Everyone is going to scramble to find a metric that helps them compete for ad dollars. Enjoy the show.

I’m not sure there is one “right answer” for metrics in the RIA world. I feel like the economics of the problem require that there be one: everyone has to be able to compete on the same playing field as everyone else. You have to be able to equally compare two properties. But in the end I think it comes down to a mix of users and time spent on a site. Both have their drawbacks. Users aren’t always “active” and time spent on a site means that people probably aren’t clicking on ads.

In the end, I think one of the more interesting aspects of the online ad business is that no one has ANY clue how to really figure out analytics for the ever-growing number of RIAs out there. Frankly, what we need, is a way to track how valuable an individual user is to advertisers. What are they doing while on your site. Are they consuming the ads? Are they clicking through? Some kind of standardized way to track that would blow the world wide open.

May 27th, 2008

Mobile advertising: "The next big wave" and a golden opportunity for RIAs

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 2:38 pm

Categories: Adobe, Advertising, Google, JavaFX, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight

Tags: Mobile Internet, Advertisement, Phone, Mobile, Rich Internet Application, Mobile Device, SMS Advertising, Advertising & Promotion, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Eric Schmidt has an interview that was posted today in which he declares that the next big wave in advertising is the mobile internet:

Second: The most obvious large space of advertising is the mobile internet. Every German has a mobile phone. Just take the success of the iPhone: It has the first really powerful web browser on a mobile device - and many more are still coming. Nokia has one coming, Blackberry has one and Motorola has one. They are all supposed to be released this year. By these products, the advertising gets more targeted because phones are personal. So targeted ads are possible. And that means the value of the ads will grow. The next big wave in advertising is the mobile internet.

I just got back from a trip to China where I did a bunch of customer visits for Adobe so for me, this interview hit at just the right time. Everyone knows the mobile internet is a big deal, and advertising will play a big part in that. But I think the confluence of mobile devices and advertising is a place where RIAs can really come into stride. Video, customizations, interactive games - all possible on mobile devices with RIAs. People are already spending money to customize their phones - something RIAs are a natural extension of - but they’re increasingly doing more sophisticated tasks like gaming and video consumption on their devices.

Having a rich environment on a phone allows advertisers to target not only at a very personal nature (due to the information on the phone) but to do so in a very engaging way. That’s key. SMS advertising is annoying and spammy. You have to be more sophisticated and I don’t think the search metaphor fits on devices as well as it does in the browser. So you can use video, use interactivity, use games, use the kind of higher-level display advertising that RIAs enable.

That’s why this is a big battleground. Microsoft is working with Nokia, Adobe has the open screen project, Google has Android, Sun is working on JavaFX for mobile devices; everyone wants a piece of what will be a lucrative pie. Things are going to get very interesting in the world of mobile RIAs over the next couple of years.

April 9th, 2008

Adobe releases the Adobe Media Player

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:09 am

Categories: Adobe, Advertising, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Media Player, Adobe Media Player, Beet.tv, Media Players, Digital Music, Digital Media, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Ryan Stewart

We announced the release of the Adobe Media Player (AMP) today which is both a push to provide content to end users as well as create a platform for monetizing and tracking online video. AMP is built on Adobe AIR so it allows you to take video content offline and also becomes the default player for FLVs so you can watch any FLV file you have inside of AMP.

Beet.tv has a great interview with Laurel Reitman from Adobe and also does a good job of writing up the implications behind AMP. Our goal with AMP is really to allow content providers to customize and brand the entire media player experience. Then with that branded experience we’re focusing on giving the content providers a lot of analytical tools so they can track video and monetize it.

The player itself allows you to go full screen and supports up to 1080p resolution and we’ve lined up a number of partners. We currently have content from CBS, MTV Networks, Universal Music Group, PBS, CondéNet, and Scripps Networks. In addition today we also launched tv.adobe.com which has content about Adobe products and how to use them.

February 8th, 2008

Using rich Internet applications to take more advertising dollars from television

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:57 am

Categories: Advertising, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Advertisement, Brand, Rich Internet Application, TV, Online Advertising, Internet, Ryan Stewart

There was a fascinating article in the Economist last month about the economic effect of the downturn on advertising that I think is very applicable to anyone tracking the rich Internet application space. The premise of the article was that the advertising market in 2008 will be relatively robust due to a number of big ticket events like the super bowl and a presidential election here in the States. But there was an undercurrent throughout the article that television advertising is probably going to be hit harder than online advertising. Online advertising is a funny thing because no one has found the holy grail quite yet. Google does a great job obviously but the amount of advertising spend on the internet is still dwarfed by the amount spent on TV. But that’s changing and the change may become more pronounced during any economic malaise as the Economist notes:

The internet’s interactivity and wealth of product information make it the best means of generating short-term sales—whereas television is best for long-term brand-building. During a downturn clients see internet ads as easier to measure and hence easier to justify to shareholders, says Mr Kaufman.

So how can we take even more share from television? How can we leverage the internet to create some of that long term brand awareness to which television is so well suited? Rich Internet applications.

The nature of advertising on television allows companies to tie very closely with an ideal or emotion. Advertising on a specific TV show associates the brand with what that show espouses. People become attached to shows and indirectly to the brands that advertise on the shows. TV ads also seem to be much better at showcasing a different kind of lifestyle which makes the brand more valuable. Currently on the internet with banner ads and pre-roll advertising we don’t get the same level of engagement with the advertising. Combine that with the fact that we’re bombarded seemingly at random by internet ads and it’s even tougher to associate a brand with something. Cohesive advertising isn’t the internet’s strong point.

But it can be in rich Internet applications for two reasons. One, the technology is richer and therefore more opportunities exist to create the kind of advertising that would benefit brands. This is both because of the audio/video capabilities but also because of the technical nature of RIAs. We can push data to clients, provide real-time collaboration and stay away from page refreshes that would ruin an experience. All that means that advertisers can control the experience all the way through and establish branding in a more strategic way. Secondly, rich Internet applications bring richness to a variety of touch points. We’re seeing RIAs on the desktop, on mobile devices, and set top boxes/video game consoles. Being able to take advantage of the same technology on a variety of devices and platforms means that advertisers can easily customize the experience so that they can provide the proper amount/type of advertising for the device using the exact same property. The same rich Internet application should have an interface customized to the small screen and the big screen and using RIAs to build brands means you can provide the right type of advertising for the medium and know that the experience will be consistent; something that doesn’t exist right now with regular HTML/banner ads.

TV still has greater reach than any rich Internet application but the internet has always excelled at allowing companies to segment the market more cleanly. RIAs provide that segmentation and also the technology to create very engaging, brand-building advertisements. Through rich media and rich data capabilities advertisers can speak to consumers in a way that both win. By using the power of RIAs we can start doing the same brand building advertisement that we see on TV and the internet can continue to take market-share from television at all levels of the advertising spectrum.