A static banner at the top of a page? We’re all too used to seeing that. Chances are, you’ve become accustomed to scrolling right past one.

But what if we told you that you can add sound and touch, and allow users to shake, tap, or swipe on a screen to interact with content? Those interactive elements are what we call rich media.

Rich media lends itself to extreme flexibility — allowing content to float, play, and expand while a user interacts with a landing page. Its evolution has presented advertisers a wealth of new opportunities for personalization and interactivity. Not to mention, rich media ads are incredibly effective and profitable, offering up greater performance and return on investment than traditional ad forms.

In this article, we’ll dive into the various types of rich media ads and how they can bolster your marketing efforts.

What Is Rich Media?

In a nutshell, rich media is interactive advertising. It is a digital content form that deviates from normal text and static images to offer users an enhanced, engaging experience.

While text ads sell with words, display ads sell with pictures, and video ads sell with motion, rich media ads can include video, audio, pictures, and other advanced features — offering more ways to involve an audience. A rich media ad can serve as a high-value piece of standalone content.

Rich media’s major benefit? Interactivity. This content invites consumers to physically engage with an ad in an immersive way, transforming traditional advertising from a passive interaction into a full-blown activity. Moreover, interactive ads deliver 3x the conversion rate of traditional video ads.

Leading Platforms Are Pushing Interactive Ads

Platforms like Google and Facebook are introducing more and more interactive ad formats on marketers to improve the customer experience. These ad solutions encourage a playful experience between people and businesses.

While Facebook will likely never be ad-free, the social platform is at least trying to make advertisements more entertaining. In September 2019, Facebook rolled out three new types of interactive ads: video poll ads, AR ads, and playable ads.

In a post to its business blog, Facebook described the motive for launching new ad types.

“People want to be included in your next big idea and are using new innovative ways to do it — less words, more GIFs, Lives, Reactions, emojis, face filters, and stickers. In turn, brands and people are becoming more intertwined and it’s changing digital advertising from a one-way push communication to an ongoing dialogue powered by creativity.”

Facebook also elevates the immersive mobile shopping experience to a new level with dynamic ad types, like its Instant Experience ads. These are full-screen takeover ads that are media-rich, load instantly, and are optimized for mobile devices. They load 15x faster than standard mobile webpages — a significant advantage when it comes to keeping customers engaged.

With the ad product, users can watch engaging videos and photos, swipe through carousels, tilt to pan, and explore lifestyle images with tagged products — all in a single ad experience.

Aside from the social media front, Google also provides businesses helpful tools to create breathtaking rich media ads. Their rich media content hub, known as Rich Media Gallery, houses rich media content from top advertisers and agencies to help inspire other companies’ campaigns.

Rich Media Reaps Major Benefits

From a pure aesthetic standpoint, it’s no question that rich media ads outperform traditional banner and display ads — they are incredibly pleasing to look at. Combine that with increased profits, compatibility with more platforms and devices, and the wealth of ways you can track success, you can see how rich media is a helpful asset in any marketer’s toolbox.

Here are some of the top benefits of rich media content:

Increased ROI & Website Traffic: Rich media ads help marketers cut through so-called banner blindness, which is when a user unconsciously ignores a banner advertisement display on a webpage.

Accelerate The Customer Journey: Rich media helps nurture prospects through your sales pipeline. With media that expands, floats, and changes upon user triggers, it encourages consumers to take actions that will lead them to future stages in the buyer journey — and eventually, to the point of purchase.

Mobile Compatibility: Mobile and tablet devices offer lots of native functionality unique to them. Unlike their desktop and print equivalents, mobile ads are touchable. The touchscreen nature of mobile devices allows consumers to move faster through the sales pipeline toward making a transaction. Thus, creatives have more opportunities to prompt users to interact physically with tilts, taps, swipes, shakes, and pinches.

High Interaction Rate: With functions like video, motion elements, and other engaging features, potential customers can interact in many ways with rich media ads. In addition, rich media banners exhibit much higher click rates and visibility than those of standard banner advertisements.

Opportunity For Creativity: The seemingly endless types of rich media give marketers the creative flexibility to deliver ads in innovative ways. Some rich media ads are so effective, consumers don’t even perceive them as ads.

Trackability: Advanced technology allows marketers to track the various levels of engagement and interaction with a rich media ad. You can collect participation data, data on video playback, interaction rates, dwell times, and more valuable metrics.

Video Integration: Shopable videos, 360-degree viewing, and other advanced video formats can be integrated into rich media ads.

Rich Media Ad Formats

Here is a look at some of the most popular rich media ad formats.

Rich Media Banner Ads

Running across the top of the webpage, banner ads are the most widely used canvas. They’re also highly visible because of their above-the-fold nature.

For years, the humble banner ad was static and offered very little in terms of interactivity — but not anymore. Now, banner ads support video, motion elements, and other HTML5-based ad units. A banner ad is exactly what it sounds like — a rectangular digital ad that mimics a banner. It has a fixed size and position on a web page or in a mobile app.

Rich Media Interstitial Ads

These ads are full-screen, interactive ads that are typically placed between standard interactions in the user experience of a website, app, or game. For instance, navigating between two articles on a news media website or transitioning between levels in a game can warrant one of these ads. Interstitial ads on web pages can either move with content or maintain a locked position as a user scrolls.

Rich Media Expandable Banner Ads

As the name suggests, the multi-directional ads expand automatically when a user interacts with them, either by hovering, clicking, or tapping.

While a standard banner ad stays in one place, an expandable one stretches beyond its original dimensions over the top of another page or app content. Expandable banner ads can expand in any direction, shape, or with fading effects. Because users have to stay on a page to see the banner fully come to life, this type of ad typically sees the highest dwell time.

Rich Media Pushdown Ads

Similar to expandable ads, these ads push down the content of a web page once user-based triggers happen.

Rich Media Slider Ads

Slider ads typically present users with a revolving slideshow of your best imagery coupled with a contextual call-to-action.

Gamified Ads

With fun at its core, gamified ads or ‘mini games’ can showcase elements of a brand through accessible gameplay. Several brands have started injecting gamification elements into their ads. While many marketers and CEOs still have their doubts and hesitancy to use games in marketing, gamification is really taking off due to sophisticated rich media forms.

3D Display Ads

As consumers, there’s nothing worse than opening a package and the product doesn’t meet your expectations. More and more companies are investing in creative 3D assets to bring more depth to their products. With 3D display ads, consumers are able to zoom in and out, rotate an image, and play an animation to see more products come to life.

Rich Media in Action

Now that you understand the importance and benefits of rich media advertising, here are some brands who have delivered engaging rich ad experiences:

Samsung

Knowing how important battery life is to most people, Samsung launched interactive ads to demonstrate its S6 model’s “super fast charging capability.”

With the help of a real-time battery identification mobile ad unit, users could get a personalized, relevant demo of the new phone’s capabilities. Leveraging moment marketing, Samsung targeted users at the moments when they most needed this charging capability.

The results? Users spent an average of 20 seconds interacting with the interstitial ad — an impressive dwell time compared to that of a static banner ad.

Starbucks

Coffee aficionado or not, there’s no denying that Starbucks has paved the way for engaging, customer-centric advertising. Starbucks dominates rich media through not just a single ad, but through their entire mobile approach.

Way back in 2014, Starbucks realized the potential of in-app experiences. Their mobile strategy is extremely engaging — chances are, you’ve heard about their well-known loyalty program that rewards users with stars. In fact, their mobile payment app now has more users than Apple’s or Google’s mobile apps.

Starbucks has capitalized off of many rich media experiences. They have successfully made use of gamification, and they’ve also worked with Spotify to integrate an audio element in their app. Through this feature, users can identify songs being played in stores and download the ones they like onto Spotify playlists.

Snickers

One day, Snickers came to the conclusion that when people get hungry, they stream songs that deviate from their usual music tastes. This hunch influenced their “Hunger Spotter” campaign — a rich media effort that tapped into Spotify’s unique streaming intelligence.

In a partnership with Spotify, Snickers targeted users at times when they started listening to a different style of music — instances they called “hungry moments.”

At these micro-moments, Snickers delivered custom audio ads to listeners in the genre they loved most, driving them to a Snickers branded playlist named “The Hunger List.” By catching users by surprise with personalized, audio-based advertisements, Snickers’ campaign generated impressive results.

Ready To Jump Into Rich Media?

For years, savvy marketers have been asking, “How do we innovate the digital banner ad?” Rich media is exactly how you do it. With more tools becoming readily available to marketers, the barrier to entry in rich media is becoming lower and lower. Supplementing banners with rich media elements like video, sound, and moving pictures can help you increase brand awareness and create new opportunities for engagement.

How Rich Media Enhances Your Content Strategy