In a previous post we saw what an interactive banner ad looks like. Now it’s time to figure out what a rich media banner is, ’cause advertisers are rightfully crazy about them: they work much better than the conventional ones.

Let’s play with an example and then talk a little about it:

Now, the first thing that you notice is that it expands when you roll over it. Thus, from the start we can see that the banner is interactive. But what makes it a rich media banner? That’s pretty simple. After it expands you can see a car and five links. Click on one of them. Ta-daa: video & sound. So we have images, text, video and sound. That make for a rich media banner, also called a multimedia banner.

Let’s try a definition here:

Rich media banners are flash banners that employ images, text, sound and video. They are often interactive, 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, a rich media banner can use several other technologies besides flash, such as Java, Javascript, and DHTML.

Note that some sources put the equal sign between interactive banners and rich media banners and even between rich media banners and flash banners, since a flash banner usually employ images and text and thus being classified as a multimedia banner. However, we think it’s useful and “educational” to emphasize the differences between these three types of flash banners.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 3:00 am and is filed under Banner Advertising Basics, Examples. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.