Firetop

Following a recent issue with a Flash banner not displaying properly in a client’s browser, I started looking into the current industry standard for Flash file export. Adobe very kindly have a chart detailing Flash penetration levels as identified by two different market research companies (below). Their combined data suggests that for early 2007 Flash 8.0 is definitely still off the agenda for Flash ad designers at around 70% penetration. However Flash 7.0 is only marginally less well saturated than Flash 6.0 at about 95% vs. 97%. For my 2007 online advertising purposes I shall be stipulating ad design be exported in Flash 5, 6 or 7 and leaving Flash 8 until 2008. (more…)

Online Advertising Operations (Ad Ops) describes the section of a company responsible for the efficient deployment of online advertising onto a website. These are the people who obtain the ad creative from advertisers, load it into ad servers such as DoubleClick, monitor the campaign on a day to day basis and track the performance. All too often this seemingly unglamorous series of duties is overlooked by both marketing and advertising staff alike. But, without the right group of people working busily behind the scenes, even the best planned web campaign may not get the volume of coverage intended… or worse, it may get too much exposure to the wrong audience. We online advertising operations people are to be cherished; we’re technically savvy online marketers who know how to sell what we deliver – online advertising. (more…)

When I was in uptown New York last month meeting with the folks at Doubleclick my attention was drawn to the ‘talking avatars’ gaining in popularity over in the US. It’s always difficult to create that ‘personal’ feel on a website consisting of just words and pictures, now with the assistance of the folks at ‘Oddcast’, you can feature your very own animated character to put your visitors at ease and audibly deliver your message.

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