Flash Advertising

Flash Platform Development of Microsites, Advergames and Branded Applications

Jason Fincanon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780240813455
• eBook ISBN: 9781136023699
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Computer Science

Create awe-inspiring, mind-blowing Flash ads, microsites, advergames, and branded applications that engage consumers and demonstrate their worth to clients. Creating Flash Advertising delivers the nuts and bolts of the development process from initial design conception to ad completion. You'll learn the best practices for:

Mastering the myriad of ad specs, deadlines, quality and version control issues and creating ads that balance campaign goals with design constraints. Preparing and building ads with team and QC standards. Using forms and data in ads without file bloatt. File optimization techniques for swf files 3rd party rich media technologies that transcend the 30k banner. Integrating video into sites and banners. Social media applications. Trafficking and tracking ads for impressions, interactions, clicks, and conversions.Using ActionScript to save development time and implement team standards.
Published projects developed with the practices and AS code presented in the book are available on the companion website http://www.flashadbook.com

1

FLASH ADVERTISING OVERVIEW

CHAPTER OUTLINE

What This Book Is and Is Not

Supporting Web site

The Flash Platform

Flash Professional

Flash Builder

AIR

Why Use the Flash Platform for Advertising

Banners

Microsites

Branded AIR Applications

Mobile Devices

Types of Ads

Standard Flash

Rich Media

Cost Can Be an Issue

Interactive Standards and the Interactive Advertising Bureau

Advertising Templates in Flash

Ad Specs

Keep It Down (Your File Size That Is)

More IAB

Deadlines

Aim Ahead of Schedule

Creeping Scope

You’re Not Alone

Keep In Touch

Microsites

Design to the Campaign

Quality Control

Test Yourself

The Reason for Quality Control

You’re Still Not Alone

Version Control

Options

A Version Control Story

What Happened?

How Could It Have Been Avoided?

Conclusion

The use of the Flash Platform in advertising has been around for many years now, and it continues to thrive even in the face of the development of other “Flash killer” technologies. Its use is far from limited to the stereotypical banner ad that people tend to think of when the word “advertising” is used in the interactive realm. In fact, the Flash Platform is used for everything from banners to corporate Web sites, from personal portfolios to client specific online news channels, and in many cases, it may even be used for desktop applications that are designed to promote your client’s brand.

The Flash Platform has matured and grown into a powerful set of tools over the years, but there are still plenty of ads and sites out there that tend to leave some people with a bad impression, and it’s up to us to change their minds. So how do we change the minds of these people and wow them at the same time? We can start by following a few simple design rules, anticipating interaction and animation issues, targeting the correct audience, and steering away from the things we find annoying or wouldn’t want to see ourselves.

As the platform has grown, so has online advertising. There was a time when you had to choose between a static .webp and an animated .gif for your banners, but that time has long since past. The option to use the Flash Platform has enabled interactive advertising agencies, as well as individual developers, to create much more engaging and entertaining advertising in many different forms. It has also opened up a channel for more interactivity and the ability to do things like gather user information from within an ad itself.

So with the lines between the computer desktop, the Internet, the television, and mobile devices blurring more and more every day, it has become increasingly important to give users better, more memorable, more interactive experiences in everything they do online, including viewing your clients’ brands by way of advertising. After all, if they remember the experience you provided, they’ll remember the brand and be more likely to buy from your client in the future. And after they buy from your client, your client will be happy and will most likely return to you for more projects (and, of course, more projects mean more income).

So let’s take a quick look at what we’ll be covering in this first chapter where I’ll first cover a little bit about the book itself and then why you should use the Flash Platform for advertising, as well as the options and considerations placed in front of you when doing so. The sections contained within this chapter are as follows:

• What This Book Is and Is Not

• Supporting Web site

• The Flash Platform

• Why Use the Flash Platform for Advertising

• Types of Ads

• Interactive Standards and the Interactive Advertising Bureau

• Advertising Templates In Flash

• Ad Specs

• Deadlines

• Microsites

• Quality Control

• Version Control

What This Book Is and Is Not

This book should be thought of and read as a sort of guide into the world of advertising with the Flash Platform. While its intention is to prepare you for the flow of projects as they come in your door and work their way to living online for millions of users to interact with, you should also understand that different places of employment will all have their own internal workings and processes to follow. With that said, there are also several constants and considerations that are absolutely unchanged from one advertising agency to the next; items like standard banner specs or file optimization.

On the flip side, this book should not be thought of as a strictly code-oriented book that developers might read to learn Flash itself. While it does contain ActionScript for the developers, it also contains a lot of information that is not specific to any single discipline. With that being the case, anyone from Flash Platform Developers to Media Directors to Account Managers can most likely find some sort of usable information within these pages.

Supporting Web site

The supporting Web site for this book can be found at http://www.flashadbook.com. On this Web site, you can find information about the chapters, share your thoughts and questions, and download many of the files from the book. Now before we dive in, let’s briefly talk about the Flash Platform and some of the tools that will be used in this book.

The Flash Platform

Until recently, when you talked to someone about Flash design and/or development, you were most likely talking about Flash itself. Whether you were talking about building a Flash Web site, a Flash animation or any other “Flash” work, it’s a good bet that the project in question was to be designed or developed using the Flash IDE. However, using the word Flash to describe a project may need a little more clarification now due to the emergence of what is now known as the Adobe Flash Platform (Fig. 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The Adobe Flash Platform.

The current short description on Adobe’s Web site states, “The Adobe Flash Platform is an integrated set of technologies surrounded by an established ecosystem of support programs, business partners, and enthusiastic user communities.” The site also lists the technologies included in the Flash Platform as Flash Player, Adobe AIR, Flex, Flash Builder, Flash Professional, Flash Media Server, and LiveCycle Data Services ES. I’ll be touching on some, but not all of these technologies in this book.

We’re obviously going to be working with Flash, and if you don’t already have it installed on your computer, you can get a trial version from the Adobe Web site. I’ll also touch on Flash Builder 4 a little, though it’s not a part of the Flash Platform, and I’ll be using Photoshop as well. Each of these can be downloaded from the following locations:

• Flash – http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/

• Flash Builder – http://www.adobe.com/products/flashbuilder/

• Photoshop – http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/

Okay, now that you’ve got your tools, I’d like to continue with some extremely brief descriptions of each one. If you’re already familiar with them, please feel free to skip ahead to the next section.

Flash Professional

Flash (Fig. 1.2) is where this all started many years ago (under a different name) and it has come a long way over all those years. It’s been around for a while and I believe (or at least hope) that it will continue to grow for many more years to come. After all, it has an entire platform named after it, right? Flash, in the sense of this particular paragraph/section, is an IDE used to develop, animate, and compile your work to usable files such as .swf files, executable (.exe) files, Adobe AIR applications, and even more recently, iPhone apps.

Figure 1.2 The Adobe Flash Professional CS5 launch screen.

Figure 1.3 The Adobe Flash Builder 4 Premium launch screen.

Flash Builder

Flash Builder (Fig. 1.3), which was previously named Flex Builder, is an IDE built by Adobe for the purpose of working with the Flex framework. The reason for the recent name change with version 4 was to tie it in more closely with the Flash Platform while also drawing a clear line of distinction between the IDE and the framework. The Flex framework itself also moved up in version number (to version 4) and includes new namespaces, components, and other tools to make your work as a designer or developer a whole lot easier while helping you complete tasks and projects much more quickly. Again, Flash Builder is available from the Adobe Web site: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashbuilder/

AIR

Adobe AIR is a runtime that not only allows you to build and deploy branded desktop games and applications with HTML, Ajax, Flash, and/or Flex, but it also allows you to do so across multiple operating systems. This means that you can build your game or application one single time and have one single installer for many users regardless if they are on Windows, Mac, or Linux. As a developer, you can build your applications with Adobe products like Flash or Dreamweaver or you may choose to use your favorite text editor in conjunction with the free AIR SDK to package your applications. For lots more information about Adobe AIR, check it out on Adobe’s Web site: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

Why Use the Flash Platform for Advertising

I’ll be completely honest here and say that the Flash Platform isn’t going to be the best option to achieve your goals 100% of the time. As with any technology, you should avoid using it just for the sake of using it. Instead, you should assess the project at hand to decide if the Flash Platform is the best option to go with. In some cases, you may want to use AJAX. In other cases, you may want to use nothing more than plain ‘ol HTML. The point is that you should choose what best serves the needs of your client. With all of that said, this is a book about creating Flash advertising, so we’ll go ahead and make the assumption your work calls for it.

Inside Advertising

The true purpose of any online ad unit is to communicate the biggest message in the smallest amount of real estate.

—Randy Bradshaw, Principal, Click Here, Inc.

Banners

So why use Flash for advertising? Why use it to create banner ads for your client’s service or product? The short answer: Brand interaction through features is not available with other options. With a static .webp or even an animated .gif banner, you might have a good enough image to get a user to click and go to the intended destination, but that’s pretty much all you have – an image. With Flash, you have the ability to engage your audience with your client’s brand. You can use smooth animation and interaction to tell a story. You can build an ad with tabs for different “pages” within your banner. You can build a banner that gives users even more interactive elements...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Flash Advertising Overview
• Chapter 2 Designing Banner Ads
• Chapter 3 Preparing and Building Ads
• Chapter 4 Forms and Data
• Chapter 5 File Optimization
• Chapter 6 Third-Party Rich-Media Technologies
• Chapter 7 Trafficking and Tracking Your Ads
• Chapter 8 Designing Microsites
• Chapter 9 Preparing and Building Microsites
• Chapter 10 Driving Traffic to Your Microsite
• Chapter 11 Advergaming and Applications
• Chapter 12 Classes
• Chapter 13 The Memory Game
• Chapter 14 Case Studies
• Index