On October 27th,1994 Wired.com (then known as HotWired) invented the banner ad. According to Wired, AT&T was the first brand to brave this new world, asking “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.”

Over the past decade the banner ad has grown up. We now have rich media ads that include video, social plugins, expansion, and Flash animation-allowing viewers to learn and engage with the advertiser without leaving the canvas. This is good news (the demise of flashing text!) for consumers as advertisers are now able to provide 1) richer experiences and 2) actual utility.

Here’s a great one from CP+B for MetLife. The ad asks the viewer to lend Schroeder (from Peanuts) a hand, allowing you to play the piano via your keyboard.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd_8okTcyog

 

The thing is, that all this great stuff requires a whole lot of time and money. First, you need creative people to come up with cool ideas and put them together in a way that they don’t scare children. There might be some storyboarding if there are multiple screens or expansion. Then, the creative people hand off all these assets to developers so they can code everything in Flash. Once the ad is done, someone packages everything up, zips it, stuffs it, uploads it, sends it. Those files are hosted on a server somewhere and a little tag is created. That tag is then sent to the publisher, the site where your ad is going to be seen. So you’re done right? You’d think so but imagine if your client wants to make that darn logo bigger or change messaging? Step and repeat.

So now, almost ten years later, millions of ads have been served billions of times. You’d imagine there’s an easier way, that everyone would be able to harness the power of rich-media? Maybe a Steve Jobs type to come in and make everything a whole lot easier/simpler/better? Not so much. Agencies and advertisers are still trying to meet 21st century demands with 20th century technology.

Sound crazy? Outraged? We were too. Enter Adventive, a cloud-based digital ad production and delivery platform that provides agencies and advertisers with end-to-end solutions to create, deliver and optimize digital ad campaigns. We believe ad technology is too complex- our platform is leaner, smarter and easier to use. It is intentionally simple, and we like it that way. With faster turnarounds, efficient workflows and real-time ad updates-the Adventive platform is built specifically for real-time marketing.

This is just the beginning. Care to join us? Get in touch for more info on our private beta.