A lot of the most interesting new developments in online advertising center around new inventory in Adobe Flash. The most obvious and mature inventory in SWFs is of course in-video advertising. Interesting discussions weighing the merits of pre-, mid-, or post-roll and border frames began a couple of years ago.

More recently, the really interesting work has included the definition of new, post-page view engagement metrics and the advertiser education needed to sell against those metrics, as well as new very interactive technologies like clickable product placement within the main video content itself.

On a second front, casual games, typically built in Flash have experienced enormous growth, both in standalone, destination site guise, and more interestingly social gaming applications within mini-app containers like Facebook Platform.

Integrated install and advertising networks have sprung up very quickly over the last year and this innovative, combined model has already started generating meaningful cash for companies like SocialMedia, Lookery, and RockYou. Mochi Media is pushing on deep integration of ads within Flash games – for example, placeing short animated ads between game levels.

In parallel, the same Flash technology enabling entertainment-focused rich media, is being leveraged to produce step function usability advances in web-based productivity, creative and communication applications – generally grouped together under the the label Rich Internet Application or RIA. Applications like Picnik (photo-editing), Buzzword (word-processing), SlideRocket (presentations), blist (data organization & discovery), and Sprout (widget creation), exploit all the inherent advantages of web applications – but also push hard against the traditional limitations of applications built with html, javascript, and AJAX – allowing you to do work in the browser that was until very recently strictly confined to desktop applications – but with vastly better social and collaborative stories.

So far, native advertising within RIAs has been almost completely neglected. The current state of the art is usually running the SWF containing the RIA in an iFrame on page with an html wrapper at the margins providing real estate for standard banner placements. In fact, the opportunity for combining advertising with RIAs is more interesting than it may first appear; social networking inventory has lately hovered around $0.50 CPMs, while some data shows ads on RIAs yielding $2.00 CPMs.

Going beyond banners, many RIAs combine a SWF application populated by an XML payload containing interesting content that would be a good candidate for Adsense style contextual advertising placements. Currently, the most feasible implementation would be a hack combining an iFrame overlaying the SWF application and containing the Adsense javascript – which in turn requires keywords to be passed in actively from the application’s XML payload, rather than being able to passively scan the content of an html page. RIAs need better advertising solutions!
-Mathew Johnson
http://www.blist.com