Who Deserves to Serve Rich Media?

But rich media is in an evolutionary period. At least, the serving of rich media ads is.

Over the last year and a half, weve seen new options for serving rich media units and been forced to consider how best to serve those units. Should we continue to work through the technology companies that developed these ad formats, and with whom weve been serving the ads, companies such as Unicast, Eyeblaster, PointRoll, and United Virtualities? Or should we go through the third-party ad servers that serve all our other advertising?

It comes down to a philosophical, as well as an economic, decision.

The third-party ad servers, such as DoubleClick (with its Motif product) and Atlas, are doing everything they can to win your rich media business. They have a fairly compelling argument. They offer aggressive CPMs (

With technology partners, theres a lot more work involved in executing a campaign. Plus, you must combine performance reports from two different sources. Oh, and then theres the matter of billing. Going the ad-server route is a great way to consolidate billing.

Technology companies have their own benefits. Theyve spent a lot of time and energy working with the publishers to negotiate adoption and standardization of their platforms. They have a lot of experience implementing rich media and will hold your hand through the process, if needed. In addition, they have in-house creative teams that can help in a pinch. As weve heard from one of our own technology partners, Agencies rarely get their creative to us on time. (Sometimes, were one of those agencies.) If were running behind, the technology companies always seem to come through for us. Thats no small benefit.

The technology companies were the ones that inspired us with innovation in the interactive creative space. Theyre still working to inspire us. Each is trying to deliver the next great, attention-getting platform.

So far, it doesnt seem that ad servers getting into the rich media space hurts technology companies. Atlas has only recently become a competitor, however. Well have to wait to see how they fare.

Will cutting the technology firms out of the equation result in less innovation? Ad servers have had little incentive to develop new rich media platforms. By choosing to serve all our rich media ads through ad servers rather than through the technology vendors that invented them, are we working against the innovation on which the industry was built?

Is there enough room in the category for both approaches? Perhaps were moving into a different part of the evolutionary cycle: The technology companies innovate new platforms that remain proprietary for a period, then the ad servers adopt these new platforms, by which time the technology companies are moving on to the next platform.

Does that sort of cycle provide the technology companies enough financial compensation to continue to innovate? Thats a debate were having at my agency. Which side of the equation do you weigh in on? Do you prefer working with the technology companies or the ad servers? Id love to hear your thoughts.