WebProNews

Google's DoubleClick is presenting findings from a new study it commissioned with Dynamic Logic,  this afternoon at the ARF Conference. The study, titled, "The Brand Value of Rich Media and Video Ads (pdf)," analyzes image (gif/jpg), simple Flash, and rich media (with and without video) ad formats.

"The study addresses challenges facing advertisers and agencies about which ad format to use, offering data to help them pick the ad formats that best match their branding goals," a representative for Google tells WebProNews. "All of this allows agencies and advertisers to extract the most brand value from their online display advertising campaign."

"This report is for advertisers, and the agencies that support them, who want to make informed decisions about the best ad formats to use for online branding campaigns," says the intro to DoubleClick's report on the research. "In online advertising, you're likely to hear goals defined as 'branding,' 'brand response,' or 'direct response.' We go a level deeper to explore he impact of ad format selection on specific branding goals in the upper and lower purchase funnel"

A few highlights from the research include:

- Rich Media formats are the most successful at driving purchase intent

- Rich Media without Video is unique among the formats in its ability to positively impact all five brand metrics (online ad awareness, aided brand awareness, message association, purchase intent, and brand favorability

- Simple Flash is the least effective of the ad formats studied

- For brand favorability, aided brand awareness and purchase intent metrics, Rich Media with Video provides a statistically significant improvement over Simple Flash at a 90% confidence level

While rich media may be the most successful format for purchase intent, only 6% of ad-serving volume last year was made up of rich media. It will be interesting to see what the percentage for 2009 turns out to be. Google has been offering rich media formats with its AdWords Display Ad Builder for a little while now. That is likely going to give the number a bit of a nudge. Yahoo just released a new Display Ads service, but it does not currently support rich media formats.

 Source: AdRelevance, 2008. Impressions by Technology for Simple Flash, GIF/JPG and Rich Media only.

I'm not going to get into every aspect of DoubleClick's 22-page document, but here are a few interesting graphs that speak louder than words:

Source: Dynamic Logic MarketNorms®, 2008. Fixed frequency level of 1. Campaigns using GIF/JPG N=33-52, Rich Media with Video N=37-47, Rich . Media Non-Video N=193-275, Simple Flash N=262-344