Many years ago, a very well known, and respected MD of an ad agency back in my old hometown of Perth, said to me when I told him what I did for a living “Multimedia? Isn’t that where i’m reading a newspaper and watching TV at the same time” - This humorous response highlighted to me (even back then) that traditional advertising agencies just don’t get the digital media space.

Fast forward to today, and it appears as though I wasn’t the only person who picked up on this disconnect. Interactive agencies such as Big Spaceship, Schematic, BLITZ and many more, have been extremely successful in working with traditional agencies in the conversion of their offline campaigns into the online space. Not wanting to seem left behind, even traditional agencies are now getting on the trolley and creating dedicated, digital sub-divisions to focus on this market.

The emergence of these interactive agencies wasn’t just a matter of coincidence - these companies understood that whilst most advertising agencies had a firm understanding of print, tv and radio mediums, they struggled tremendously when trying to come to grips with digital. Those who have worked in digital for any degree of time know that it’s not a simple, cut-and-dried medium. So much so, that even within interactive, we’re starting to see the same issues faced by traditional applications development firms, such as the divide between the creative ‘front-end’ and the technical ‘back-end’. As such, we’re staring to see the emergence of specialsied partnerships such as those between BLITZ and gSkinner.com. These types of partnerships effectively offer clients the best of breed in ‘front-to-back’ solutions for their branded applications.

Despite the global explosion of interactive agencies over the last five years, and the numerous documented successes of branded applications, Brian Morrissey of Ad Week is of the opinion that branded applications are “The Newest Brand Graveyard“. In his article, Morrissey appears to somewhat ignorantly base the success of ALL branded applications under the domain of how well they perform within social media environments such as Facebook. Despite appearing to be a technical writer for Ad Week, Morrissey’s lack of expertise in this area clearly demonstrates that he’s actually one of these traditional old skool advertisers who thinks they know the digital space.

The reality is, that branded applications have been around way before Facebook was even conceived. In 1996, Goodby, Silverstien & Partners hired Red Sky Interactive to develop what could be considered the world’s first branded application - a web banner based version of the old skool classic Pong for Hewlitt Packard (HP). The internet was a mere infant at this point, and it was Red Sky’s Chief Creative Officer Joel Hladecek who took the plunge in developing the game using a revolutionary new (web based) technology - Macromind (now Adobe) Director (a pre-cursor to Shockwave). In doing so, he essentially started the branded application wave that so many organisations are (successfully) riding today.

Whilst I won’t deny that there have been a stack of branded application failures, I would hazard a guess that the bulk of these came from traditional agencies with little-to-no understanding of interactive.

So in an effort to bring an element of constructiveness to my criticisms, i’ve outlined a few pointers for those thinking of playing in this space;

• Branded Applications are not an Afterthought - Good application development is a complex process, and not something that’s hastily hacked together as an afterthought for a campaign. Ensure the planning (for the development) of the application is considered from day 1 of your campaign planning.
• Leave it to the Experts - Don’t pretend you know how to play in a space that you don’t. Just as filming a TVC requires the specialised skill-sets of lighting operators, make-up artists, camera-operators and directors, so too does application development. Good application development will at a minimum require a user-experience (UX) expert, graphic designer, a front-end developer, a back-end developer, account manager, and a project manager.
• Give Value - If you’re going to go to the trouble of developing a branded application, make sure you add some value for the end-user. After all, they are your target audience, and they’ve taken the time to download and interact with your application. Practical, useful desktop widgets - leveraging a technology like Adobe AIR are a great example of how to offer long-term brand awareness (thats displayed everytime the user interacts with it) combined with long-term usefulness. Furthermore, using the update-feature of AIR you can extend the life of your application, by quickly and easily updating it on the end-users’ machine once a new campaign is launched.
• Keep it in Context - Where possible, branded applications work best when aligned to another campaign. Random, stand-alone branded applications have less chance of success if they’re not partnered with another form of media (e.g. online, print, or radio). Additionally, don’t market the application to a target audience outside of its primary context - e.g. don’t promote a car servicing application, within a home-cooking recipe forum.
• Right Time, Right Place - Following closely on context’s heals, is application download placement. Be sure to place the download promo/link in an easy to find location (within your page/site). There’s no point in hiding the download link on a page/section that’s tucked away on an unrelated page/section at the back of your site. Be sure to maintain the call to action right up the front within the context of the main campaign promo.
• Track, Track, Track! - It’s imperative to both agencies and their customers that tracking be factored into branded applications. Track downloads, track unique clicks, track connections, track updates, track usage time, track mouse location. Regardless of whether you envisage using these metrics, be sure to track and record them. They will be gold.

Dan Goldman from Adobe’s Advanced Technology Labs has showcased a sneak peak of some of the interactive video manipulation research he’s been working on with fellow Adobian David Sales and their University of Washington colleagues Brian Curless and Steven M. Seitz.

The research focuses on the streamlining of the user interface, and workflow, associated with manipulating video. Delving into features such as;

• Video object tagging and annotation
• Video object motion point/path tracking
• Video navigation via object manipulation
• Still image capture/composition via video object manipulation

Adding validation to this train of research, Dans work is very similar to that of Pierre Dragicevic and Gonzalo Ramos who have been have also been working on their own research project with their DimP - Direct Manipulation Video Player.

If you’re keen to check out some of these features in action, then be sure to check out the video below;

Whilst we’re years off seeing API’s available that leverage some of the functionality outlined in the research. I think it’s the application of said research, within rich media based applications, where things start to get really interesting. All of this has definitely got my creative juices flowing and I see a HUGE potential for applications using this technology, such as;

• Games
• Social networking applications
• Collaborative video sharing applications
• Rich media advertising mash-ups
• Interactive sports applications
• Video object based metadata tagging
• Object motion tracking for security and ambient media based applications

If you’re keen to dig deeper on some of the magic going on behind the scenes, then be sure to have a read of the Video object annotation, navigation, and composition paper that Dan and the team released at the proceedings of the 21st annual ACM symposuim on User Interface Software and Technology.

Shout-out to JD for the heads up on this piece.