It's a Ad Ad Ad Ad World

I’ve spent many hours over the last month trying to figure out a way to have the flexibility to put any ad network’s tag I want inside my Flash RIA. I cannot because we use Google/DFP and that means I am forced to tell our advertisers “use DART Motif or else we cannot serve your differing and competing ad network’s ad tag inside our Flash application”.

I wish I was not in so above my head as far as creating a piece of software that would let me place ANY ad network’s tag in my Flash app via DFP(Dart for Publishers). Maybe this exists and I’ve just never seen it? If you know of a company trying to make this a reality, please let me know. If it does not exist I think Adobe should perhaps start working on it if they are not already.

My reasoning is this:

Over the past decade we’ve all watched Flash grow from simple web doodle beginnings into a mighty powerful application building juggernaut. The Flash Platform has rightfully claimed its stake as a standard medium, if not the de facto medium, for creating and displaying rich content and ads across a wide spectrum of industries and consumer electronic technologies: sports, movies, automotive, financial, network TV, mobile apps, set-top boxes, car navigation, kiosks, interactive learning, games, and the list goes on.

There is one element in the aforementioned, however, that if you took out – I think the rest may not have happened and I see this now as something to be pretty concerned about. That is advertising and tracking inside of Flash Platform based RIAs.

Ad agencies, publishers and Freelancers using Flash to create rich media advertising over the last decade have been a cash cow for Flash developers and Macromedia/Adobe - if not THE cash cow.

Although Flash itself is getting more powerful and the platform expanding daily– what has been principally stagnant for the past decade is the way in which we traffic and monitor ads. We are at a point now with RIA building where many enterprise projects are not getting done with Flash because monetizing it is simply too difficult. I run across this more and more with each passing day. A cross-ad-network system for integrating ad units into Flash does not exist as far as I know. If it does, please correct me. Now that we are moving toward a world of RIAs everywhere, I see more and more sites opting to use AJAX technologies simply because it integrates easier with their ad serving and tracking needs.

The point of all this? Flash RIAs need advertising trafficking help…badly. The problem is not so in our faces now, but give it a year or two as hopefully the demand for in-Flash advertising is requested for RIAs, games, mobile etc…, otherwise this could get ugly for Flash.

The companies that run the advertising show are not going to help Adobe. The company I work for created and sold Google a prototype of what is now their ad inventory management software. I’m sure if we were inspired enough we could pull off inventing a cross-network ad system - but that is so very far from our core business it will never happen. By the same token, Google, MS, Yahoo or XYZ ad network could open their network to any 3rd party rich media tags – ain’t gonna happen either.

It is very much an uphill battle in today’s world. Especially because so many big sites’ IT departments (including ours) are either .net or Java based and gladly choose something they understand out of the box (AJAX) over Flash any day especially when it comes to scalable advertising.

Hate to sound so glum, but I hate roadblocks and I can see the darkness at the end of the tunnel unless Adobe somehow gets down-and-dirty into the ad serving world. With each passing day I see another ad tag go into an AJAX RIA for amongst other reasons, the fact that it is too hard to implement granular metric driven advertising into Flash Platform RIAs. I see AJAX developers quite excited and anxious to use HTML 5 and Canvas. And why wouldn’t they be jazzed about this? It will enable them to do cool flash-like things with JavaScript and SVG. It will be slow as heck, buggy, force your browser to crash even more and not cross-platform for sure…however not enough seem to care about that anymore. Many developers are paid by the hour and usually people blame Flash for browser crashes anyway.

At the top of the advertising food chain there are now (after the many mergers) about 5-7 companies who dominate about 95% of online ads (Google/Doubleclick, Microsoft/Atlas, Pointroll, Eyeblaster, 24/7, Value Click and a small handful of others). Each one of these companies has a proprietary technology to deliver and more importantly, TRACK rich media ads so they can say to advertiser XYZ – “we delivered the x million impressions we promised you”, for e.g.. None that I know of really has any inspiration to make embedding advertising and/or tracking INSIDE Flash based RIAs easier – and certainly not for a competing ad-serving company’s tag. Some like Google and Microsoft actually gain a huge advantage to NOT make it easier.

Unless we can advertise cross-network in the Flash Platform, big RIA projects will continue to not be created in Flash. Why would Microsoft/Atlas make inserting ads into Flash easier when what they really want is Silverlight based ads via Atlas Rich Media everywhere instead? Why would Google help a technology that can compete with Doubleclick? I think the answer is an outside company like Adobe to make the ultimate cross-network rich media ad wrapper.

Yes, there are hacks and roll-your-own wrapper solutions that are very complex at best to build and retain the primary ad networks metrics, but this will usually be for only one ad serving technology. None of these technologies play nice with each other. Sure we can traffic an Eyeblaster ad through DFP, but not when it comes to Flash.

It does not look like an all encompassing solution will come out of any one company so I think Adobe needs to perhaps step up and either create a universal ad platform plug-in of sorts, or stir things up and make the case for a a consortium, standard, or something to make monetizing Flash Platform based RIAs easier. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading and I welcome your comments.