Mix08 Session 3 – Silverlight and Advertising

This session is to be geared to how Silverlight is used in advertising and media delivery.  Following the last few acquisitions of Microsoft’s, and listening to the keynote, they are going to be focusing on advertising a lot more now and in the future.  With my current focus on Brand sites at BMS, this is a topic of great interest.

Polite Advertising

• Polite advertising is a way of delivering a small banner advertisement, and provide lots more information to the user inline, on demand, when requested. 
• Polite ads should have a fast initial load time and render very quickly
• They should also not block the rest of the page from downloading. 
• Incremental elements should download later, and do so asynchronously
• There are two techniques to polite advertising with Silverlight – Splash Screens, and Xap Loads Xap
• Splash Screen – Static splash screen while larger incremental downloads
• XAP loads XAP – same idea, but you can download other components as needed

Cross Domain Support

• Ads are typically sourced and tracked at different domains from the page content
• The default behavior for servers is to throw an Access Denied error
• By adding Policy files, you allow access to specific domains
• You can use Flash policy files, or Silverlight Specific ones – ClientAccessPolicy.xml

Tracking events

• Silverlight has a rich event model
• You can track activity with mouse interaction, or you can use container state (i.e. size, shape, etc)
• User click-throughs spawn new page, and then send a ping to an ad tracking servers

EyeWonder

• Work with Atlas and DoubleClick
• Leverages their custom InStream Advertising Roadmap workflow
• By providing additional interactivity & tracking in advertising, you gain more information about your customer
• As the add is planned, built, and purchased, EyeWonder ensures the ad fits within the parameters of the host site (ad size, file size, bit rate, etc)

Conclusion

This session provided a lot of new information about the design, development, and deployment of banner advertising, and how it will be impacted by the improvements in Siverlight.  I will probably wind up downloading and watching this session again.