Greystripe Inc. has announced that they will now be offering advertisers the ability to target the iPhone audience for the first time through rich media ads including Flash IAB medium rectangles and game-in-game (or “tailgate”) ads. The largest ad-supported applications and games network has made marketing to the iPhone mobile audience turnkey for agencies, digital media buyers and brands by supporting online ad servers like Google’s DoubleClick and Microsoft’s Atlas.
“Greystripe’s rich media ads performed extremely well for us,” said Michelle Mayorga, Mobile Director at Rock the Vote, a Greystripe advertiser, in the press release. “Advertising in the iPhone with highly engaging ads was perfect for our mission to build the political power of young people because the iPhone reaches a highly targeted demographic.”
In an effort to make it easier for the online media buyer to purchase mobile, Greystripe has brought creative power to the iPhone with Flash creation tools. Each of Greystripe’s new ad formats are focused on consumer engagement:
• GS.Impact – offers all of the creative power of Flash on an iPhone, allowing brands to extend any online advertising campaign directly into mobile
• GS.Tailgate – offers the ability to create miniature advertiser-branded games in Flash and place them before, during or after existing iPhone games
Actions for all of Greystripe’s ad formats include branding, click to YouTube, iTunes, maps, App Store, data, call, audio, survey and canvas.
“Mobile has long been in need of a scalable advertising model and Greystripe’s new ad formats resolve that issue on the iPhone,” said Michael Cai, Director of Digital Media and Gaming at Parks Associates, in the press release. “Using the iPhone’s revolutionary platform, Greystripe has solved the serving, reporting, third-party tracking and, best of all, ad creation problems that have plagued the mobile advertising industry since inception.”
An April 2008 Screen Digest report forecasts that the market for rich media advertising on mobile will reach $2.79 billion by 2012. The report also states that mobile game ad formats will provide a valuable source of innovative marketing opportunities for brands aspiring to connect and interact with their customers1.
“Greystripe is looking to address the lack of advertising standardization in mobile by committing to IAB online formats,” said Michael Chang, CEO and Co-founder of Greystripe, in the press release. “We have made it easy for advertisers by removing barriers to execution. Brands like Jeep, RadioShack, New Line Cinema, Rock the Vote and Yahoo! have seen strong results.”
Greystripe is the rich media advertising platform for mobile. Greystripe’s product suite enables brand advertisers to communicate their brand message with a unique mobile audience, publishers to gain advertising revenue by serving ads through their games, and consumers to play high-quality games for free. Greystripe’s in-game advertising system is protected by a broad array of patents pending and currently serves ads into more than 900 game titles from 100 publishers supporting over 1,400 handset models. Greystripe reaches millions of mobile game players by powering over 120 Catalog distribution partners, through its online portal GameJump.com, on the mobile Web at wap.gamejump.com, and through the iPhone App Store. Greystripe was named an AlwaysOn Global 100 winner in 2008, Red Herring Global 100 winner in 2007 and the Under the Radar Best in Show: Mobility winner in 2006.
More information about Greystripe: www.greystripe.com.
Source: Greystripe Inc.
Meghan Keane reports for Wired, “They’re not really using Flash. They’ve just developed a home-spun tool that brings ‘all of the creative power of Flash’ to the iPhone.”
“‘We’re taking flash ads and turning them into a format that’s allowed to be shown on the iPhone,’ says Greystripe’s CTO Andy Choi. That process essentially uses HTML and JavaScript to render images that look like video,” Keane reports.
Full article here.
[Attribution: Distorted-Loop.]
oh great, more ads. i hope we get mobile firefox with adblock SOON!
Since A-Dope-e isn’t making it happen fast enough, someone had to.
well, I’ll be sure to avoid these apps… I dislike flash enough as it is, any more and it might actually turn to hate.
I find this whole article mystifying, … but somehow still so boring that I can’t force myself to click on the (even longer and even more boring) actual story.
Anyone want to explain exactly what this company is even trying to do? Flash is not on the iPhone nothing this company says or does will put it there.
Are they turning Flash ads into quicktime? Are they hard coding advertisements into games? This sounds like complete BS to me.
Now does everyone understand why Apple doesn’t want Flash on the iPhone? It’s not just that flash would possibly run slower, it’s that the plateform would be hit with an onslought of advertising. So far Apple has tried hard not to sell us out: No FM in iPods, no commercials in iTunes, etc. Flash is just another advertising platform.
There goes the neighbourhood.
Anyway, that’s an interesting comment there, smell my finger. I too have been using FF rather than Safari on my MBP simply because of Ad block+, No script etc. goodies. I miss the 3 finger touch gestures that are on Safari though, but can’t do that on FF. Is there anyway to have the features of Adblock plus on Safari or have the touch gestures enabled on FF? Anyone here knows, or do I have to go beg/bug the macoshints.com?
A little misleading. It sounds like they are taking Flash material and converting it to JavaScript (SVG?)…an option I was hoping Adobe would have incorporated into the Flash app when they bought Macromedia. Adobe WAS a big promoter of SVG/JavaScript client side programming.
Unfortunately they decided to milk it and go for the big revenue Flash could create with it’s massive install base and keep the output proprietary.
A bright moment is when they announced they were going to support standards based H264 video in Flash. Cool, this meant that we could take all of our existing streaming video content and run it in a Flash interface! Wrong…Flash uses their own proprietary streaming protocol so you can only stream the standards based video on their proprietary server.
Here’s an idea – why don’t advertising companies try using existing web technologies, instead of a proprietary platform which they have to pay extra for? They’re victims of a platform lock-in they voluntarily walked into.
Of course, this will inevitably make browsing more annoying, since avoiding ads won’t be as easy as simply avoiding Adobe Flash, but it’d sure knock the props out from under Adobe’s delusions of world domination.
@Gabriel
That sounds like what they are doing. They have developed tools that allow them to create dynamic, animated ads that will play on the iPhone BECAUSE they are based on existing web standards, not proprietary platforms like Flash. I recently converted my own website from Flash to JavaScript because of the iPhone. The iPhone won’t play Flash, and it won’t play animated GIFs, but it will run JavaScript which can direct the swapping of images to create animation. It’s just a different approach, but it’s all based on well-established standards.
The confusion around this article is caused by a poorly written headline. Greystripe is not bringing Flash to the iPhone at all–they are simply eliminating Flash as a requirement for placing animated ads on web pages.
Isn’t this just sproutcore?
What is Joost using, because I had heard they were using Flash, or did they have to re-encode their whole library like YouTube?
@Jeremy:
“Anyone want to explain exactly what this company is even trying to do?”
They are trying to sound significant while peddling some useless crap nobody would want if they wrote in plain english.
@Mo,
It could also be the CSS animations that are hardware accelerated. 3D transforms and much much more.
Flash ads on the iPhone??? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
adblock I want you sooooo bad