GE live video ads- imagination at work

A co-worker lead me to this story about the first foray of live video being used in banner ads:

“GE last month became the first advertiser to present live streaming video within banner ads, using a new feature developed by rich media company EyeWonder.
GE used the technology, called LiveWonder, to deliver a live webcast of Chairman-CEO Jeff Immelt presenting the company’s annual report to investors in a banner ad campaign that ran on about 10 Web sites.”- Kate Maddox, BtoBonline.com

Rich Media has made some huge leaps in the past year in regards to video, but to push live dynamic content through an ad network is incredible powerful. Sharing your annual report is spiffy, but imagine if this was used during “Black Friday”for an electronics boutique. You could have an HSN type setup and sell the latest GPS gear in Realtime. O wait that may be “pop under” annoying to the user. Maybe not great ideas but it certainly merits a bit more thought and maybe even a test. The LiveWonder does have limited functionality as why would you want to show live content? Only time-sensitive content (News) would seem like the best fit for this tool, as the rest could be created and then distributed with out using LiveWonder.

“With great power comes great responsibility”

EyeWonder thus far has been a real hero in the rich media world. With increased competition from Google’s no-fee rich media serving I wonder how EyeWonder will stay the dominate rich-media ad server. They may have tripled their market share in ‘07, but Google Video and Banner ads with $0 serving cost is sure cut that share in ‘08.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Splendid, New Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.