[Sigia-l] Flash Ads At The New York Times

[Christopher Fahey [askrom]]

Bill:
> Hey, if the user doesn't dig the result screw the user?

Jared:
> They are far more costly to develop that animated banner
> ads or flat images, but they have increased in popularity 
> because of their attention-grabbing qualities.


Calm down everybody! :) Honestly I don't see what the problem is. I
poked around the NYTimes site a little bit and yes I saw a couple of
Flash ads. Compared to other advertising formats, the Flash ads ranged
from totally benign to downright beneficial. I didn't see anything
warranting the frustration expressed in this thread. 

Here's what I found:

1) I did not see any Flash ads of the type that float on *top* of the
page content and require the user to click to close the ad (this is a
DHTML trick that is also used on non-Flash entities as well). In reality
we are talking about ads that take up no more screen real estate than
non-Flash ads. The Flash ads are no worse than any other ad in this
respect. I did, however, see regular pop-up browser window ads, yuck
(the two I saw were not Flash)!

2) I checked the file sizes of the Flash ads I saw. Byte-wise, the ones
produced by the NYTimes itself  seem to mostly be in the 10kb range.
This is similar to most static GIFs with the same pixel dimensions, and
a hell of a lot smaller than similar animated GIFs. And they move nice
and smoothly (this is what Flash was originally meant for, by the way -
small filesize, smooth motion). A Compaq Flash ad clocked in at 24kb,
smaller than any of the three NYTimes editorial photos I saw on the same
page. One Flash ad for for the movie "Bend it like Beckham" was 51K,
which is kind of large I guess but it displayed instantly: Flash can
load the first few frames of a movie while the rest streams in the
background, barely impacting screen-load time.

3) The vast majority of the ads at the NYTimes site are still static
gifs, followed by animated gifs (which could have loaded faster if they
were Flash!). There were some DHTML/GIF dynamic ads (Optimum Online)
that on rollover unfurled over the page content. I saw a Java applet ad
with *video* in it for the "Beckham" movie that damn near crashed my
browser. It wasn't Flash, though.


You anti-Flash people have to lighten up and recognize your real foes.
If it is *advertising* itself you object to, then just say so (as some
have already pointed out) and please don't blame Flash.

With regards to Jared's "far more costly to develop" comment, I totally
disagree: Animated Flash ads are *far* cheaper to produce than similar
animated GIF ads because the Flash authoring environment is so much
easier to use than any animated GIF production software, and produces
much smaller final output, not requiring hours of compression tweaking.
If you want a Flash ad with interactivity in it or with tons of added
content, then now we're comparing apples and oranges. An interactive
Flash ad is clearly more substantial than an animation and obviously
involves more person-hours and expense. On the other hand, making even a
*static* banner ad in Flash can be cheaper than making a static GIF ad
because you don't have to spend time optimizing the compression, color
settings, etc. Flash is a pretty good drawing/layout tool, in many ways
easier to use than Photoshop.

Flash is not an expensive tool at all unless you choose to use it to do
fancy things. In its simplest form, as a tool for simple graphic
animation, it is far and away the cheapest and most efficient tool for
making and delivering online animated banner advertising... and I
frankly wish more sites would use it if they must animate their ads.

-Cf

[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
sci: http://www.askrom.com
biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com