Debris from Dot Com Crash Hits Animators

ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.10 - JANUARY 2001

Debris from Dot Com Crash Hits Animators
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In Ed Anderson's The Bottle, we find our hero as he is accosted by giant slugs. © AtomFilms.

New Avenues
In addition, in search of outlets for their talents, Flash animators are often branching out into advertising and marketing, fields where demand promises to grow, if only moderately, in coming years. In the December, 2000, report "Streaming Video Advertising: Despite Hype, Limited Opportunity," analyst firm Jupiter Communications, predicts that by 2003, 20% of online advertising will consist of streaming and rich media (e.g. Flash).

JibJab started pursuing these areas intensively in September 2000. "We're pursuing opportunities in the advertising industry and helping corporate clients create interesting entertainment-based 'viral' marketing campaigns," says Gregg Spiridellis. (Viral marketing works by getting users of a service to spread the word about the service. An example is a free email service that includes a blurb about the service at the bottom of each message.)

Within the online marketing space, JibJab is looking for outlets other than the client's Website as well. "There are a hundred other ways to get content out there: email, PDAs, third party sites not related to the client site," says Gregg Spiridellis.

Another scene from JibJab's Capitol Ill. © JibJab Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

JibJab is also building a library of characters that could be spokesmascots for certain brands. Continuously finding projects in the marketing space that can pay the bills allows JibJab to keep creating shorts and putting them online.

One emerging area of online advertising that may offer employment to animators is streaming ad insertion, in which streaming ad content is inserted into other streaming content. Inserted ads are harder to ignore than banner ads, because they appear in the area of the screen where you're focusing. In addition, it may be possible to relate the ads to the content the user initially requests, allowing targeted advertising.

For these reasons, inserted ads bring high response rates. Thus, for the same number of eyeballs, advertisers are willing to pay more for streaming insertion. (Banner ads cost $10 to $20 per thousand views on average; streaming insertion is usually over $20.)

Streaming ad insertion could benefit animators in two ways: First, as online entertainment sites increase their revenues by inserting ads in animations, the value of those animations increases. Animators could share in those revenues. In addition, animators can play a role in creating streaming ads. Enterprising animators could even create shorts with ad insertion in mind and pitch them to sponsors. One sure way of getting a favorable reception from a content distribution site is to approach them with a sponsor in hand.

There are signs that streaming ad insertion is picking up steam. For instance, in December, Akamai announced its MediaPlus Advertising service, to help streaming content providers insert ads. Ads are provided by Engage and Hitplay Media, two of the biggest ad companies on the Net. The first two users of the service will be iClips, a free service allowing users to incorporate streaming video into email or Websites, and StudioNext, a digital media production house. Akamai is one of the major content delivery networks (CDNs) helping content providers speed streaming content across the Net. Some sites, such as iFilm, that offer animated content on the Web already use Akamai's CDN services.

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