Rich Media? Rich Indeed!
By Jack Love
Not too long ago, the
mantra in Internet retailing land was "keep it simple." Web
sites, it was reasoned, should not be loaded up with a video and other
ambitious graphics because consumers go to sites to shop, not to be
entertained or marketed or informed. All the high-content graphics did, the
argument went, was slow down the site, frustrate the web shopper and lead
to abandonment.
But that was before 38% of American homes got hooked
up to the Internet via broadband DSL or cable connections. It was before
last year, when fully two-thirds of web shoppers accessed retail web sites
through broadband hook-ups to the home or work or wi-fi-rigged coffee
shops. In short, the superhighway running to the web store has added a few
lanes, and the speed limit sign has been blown away.
As our cover story in this issue makes clear, this
growing broadband access is having a profound impact on the way Internet
merchants operate. Web retailers are increasingly using video and other
so-called rich media to inject a massive dose of graphical jazz into their
sites. Video clips are used to sell movies, run "live" demos on
products, show how products are assembled, explain how electronic
accessories hook up to PCs, or extend a 30-second TV ad into a much more
engaging story video on the web. Witness how Reebok.com garnered 1 million
e-mail addresses last year from visitors to the site who registered to see
a four-minute spot called Terry Tate—Office Linebacker. Never mind
that the clip is geared to a teenage audience (that’s being
generous), it nonetheless strikes a chord with a major segment of the
sneaker market.
Rich media is also being used, quite successfully, to
market to shoppers at web sites. Advertising spending on web sites, once
considered a dead category, soared 20% last year to $7.2 billion, outpacing
growth in all other forms of advertising. Rich media is the reason why.
According to a recent report from DoubleClick, rich media accounted for 40%
of all online advertising in the fourth quarter of 2003 and registered a
60% gain from rich media web advertising in Q4 of 2002.
This growth in rich media is happening for reasons
that go well beyond the growing width of the pipe connecting web shoppers
to their favorite sites. Broadband is merely the enabler; it’s not
the fundamental explanation for the trend. That belongs to the force that
drives all retail marketing—the cash register. Web merchants
we’ve surveyed report higher conversion rates when they add video and
other rich media to their sites. And DoubleClick’s Ad Serving Report
concludes that rich media ads are at least 50% more likely to result in a
post-impression sale than static web ads. The point is that web shoppers
find rich media entertaining, informative, provocative, and stimulating;
and web merchants who use the technology thoughtfully find it a rich
experience in more ways than one.
So much for mantras. Unless, of course, it goes
something like this: today’s web merchandising phenomenon is
tomorrow’s yawn. Consider that Intel last month announced a chip
based on optics that, theoretically at least, will process data 50 times
faster than a conventional chip based on electrical impulses. What web
merchandising looks like when that chip-making technology becomes
commercial at the end of this decade is anybody’s guess. But you can
be fairly certain that it won’t resemble anything Internet retailers
do today.
jack@verticalwebmedia.com
