There have been a lot of posts about how HTML5 is great for website development. The subtler, yet more interesting story about HTML5 is that it has incredible potential to make advertising both rich and scalable, especially as publishers and advertisers grapple with the requirement to serve slick creative to all devices. As a result, the W3C standard that is "not ready for production yet" is gaining tremendous popularity on mobile and tablet devices and has become a major game changer for mobile display advertising.
Why is this story particularly exciting right now? Just this month, commonly implemented ad serving platforms, such as Google with its Doubleclick DART ad serving platform and various other platforms used by premium publishers have been or are being upgraded to also track impressions on the mobile device. This method is called client side counting, and when desktop ad servers started using client side counting on the web back nearly 10 years ago, that made a huge difference in the confidence of an advertiser to believe in the new metrics they were receiving from digital advertising.
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Guest author Xavier Facon is CTO at Crisp Media, a rich media advertising technology company based in New York City, and blogs regularly about ad technology and mobile best practices.
While this somewhat esoteric technical issue seems minor, the advent of client side counting on mobile is a big deal for mobile display advertising. Aside from the ability to create richer ads that can be served in broad range of mobile sites and apps, this measurement issue had been the second most important impediment for agencies to easily plan, create and track mobile campaigns.
For a while, it looked like a significant discrepancy between the mobile ad impression count of publishers and that in the agency reports threatened to put a break on the momentum of mobile display advertising. Many publishers were still counting the impressions via an obsolete server-side method, whereas the in depth reports that the agencies demanded were created by systems that tracked the impressions via a device-side JavaScript triggered trackers. A 20 to 50 percent discrepancy was the result.
Unlike on the desktop, this next version of HTML is not receiving a lot of competition on mobile devices from plug-in technologies like Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash in the area of cross-browser compatible animation and video technology. For a rapidly growing category of media tablets and app phones, it turns out, developers have turned to HTML5 for its easy distribution, great graphical abilities and flexible audio/video features.
Even technology evangelists of plug-in technologies such as Flash would agree that choosing the right tools for a job, means using the simplest tool that supports all your needs - HTML5. But for a while, the advantages of HTML5 for the purpose of mobile advertising were hiding in plain sight.
Only last year, the creative work for mobile ad campaigns were often done by a select group of specialized companies. The solutions were partly proprietary and ad servers were tied to specific proprietary ad units. This situation fragmented the mobile media buys so much that the effort to plan a sizable campaign was problematic.
Realize that to serve an ad campaign on mobile apps or on mobile websites, there is the major issue of device technology fragmentation to overcome as well. Even if limiting the campaign to the latest smart phones, there are various screen sizes, a handful of operating systems, dozens of browser versions, and hundreds of device models that the ad units will have to be displayed on. This is where HTML5 has filled a need very well.
It may seem that Apple focuses on native technology only. Apple, in fact, uses HTML5 to deliver iAds. However, they are not using HTML5 in an open way, so creative agencies cannot customize ad features and UI, which is a very big part of the value that top creative agencies provide.
The web container required to render the ad unit in the mobile browsers is also included in native applications and provides a level of uniformity for serving ads onto different platforms. A broadly supported advertising industry consortium called ORMMA (Open Rich Media Mobile Advertising) had engineers work for the past year on standard API's and guidelines to help ad tech companies the rest of the way towards interoperability. This is now turning into a HTML5 fueled ecosystem of beautiful, innovative and interactive ad campaigns.
For creative agencies to edit HTML5-based ad creatives, there is now Tumult's Hype, Sencha's Animator, Adobe's tools and many others for quickly implementing advanced animations and interactions. For media agencies and publishers, there are working groups at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) who are creating guidelines, defining formats and addressing general interoperability issues related to mobile rich media advertising.
It may seem that Apple focuses on native technology only. Apple, in fact, uses HTML5 to deliver iAds. However, they are not using HTML5 in an open way, so creative agencies cannot customize ad features and UI, which is a very big part of the value that top creative agencies provide. The phase that is upon us is one where HTML5 advertising technology is decoupled from ad networks like iAd.
What we see in the future with open approaches to the delivery of HTML5 advertising is an open ecosystem where every creative agency can design ads for the Web and apps on the 175 MM + Apple devices, 100 MM+ Android devices and a growing number of HTML5 capable RIM, Nokia and Windows devices.
Although most of the discussion around HTML5 has been about site building and the arms race between websites and apps, advertising is arguably one of the most remarkable accomplishments of HTML5 so far - and we are still several years before the standard is officially finished.
The city of Philadelphia is demanding money from bloggers who were honest enough to report the meagerest - $11, $50 - of revenue from ads or donations.
According to the law, any blogger who enables advertising is required to register as a business, pay for a license and pay taxes on their profits no matter how small, the Philadelphia City Paper reported last week.
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Philadelphia requires a license for the privilege of doing business when there is "activity for profit," a tax attorney told the paper, even if the activity did not earn a profit the year before or may never turn a profit.
The license is $300 for a lifetime or $50 a year.
But the city only knows about the ads you're placing on your freely-hosted blog if you report that income on your taxes.
At least two small-time bloggers are being asked to pay the price for their honesty. Marilyn Bess earned $50 between a few articles on eHow.com and her Wordpress-hosted blog about green living. She got a letter from the city demanding she pay $300 for a license plus taxes on her profits.
Another blogger, Sean Barry, writes about music on his blog Circle of Fits, hosted on Blogspot. He earned $11 in profit over two years and also received a letter.
I never expected Circle of Fits to "make money" or be deemed a "business"... I put ads on it as an experiment, and I don't ever expect anyone to click on them..I don't even know how to put the time in to learn how to control which ones are being presented.
Bloggers are just a subset of workers affected by this regressive tax. According to the city's strict rules, any freelancer based in the city qualifies as a business and needs to get the license.
We've heard of cities requiring licenses when things like food or building construction are involved. But blogging?
What are the rules for microbusinesses in your city?
The Snuggie. Can any marginally-useful product peddled on late night TV ever match its success? The infomercial for the blanket with sleeves known as the Snuggie has got to be one of the most ridiculed pieces of television ever produced - the parody advertising the "what the f$#@ blanket" has more than 13 million views.
But the Snuggie is also the only infomercial product that we've known ordinary people to actually purchase. And now, the makers of Snuggie are soliciting videos in an attempt to capitalize on the running joke.
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The Snuggie has been riffed on by talk show host Ellen DeGeneres ("Isn't this attractive?") and lampooned on the sitcom 30 Rock (as the "Slanket"). A search for "snuggie parody" on YouTube yields 1,440 results.
It's hard to know what inspired such comedy at the expense of the Snuggie. Perhaps it was the commercial's placement on the Comedy Central network; possibly it was that the ad epitomized the infomercial art form, known best for melodrama, bad acting and cheap production, all to glorify an item or device that pushes the boundaries of uselessness so far that the factory workers who assembled it in China are probably still laughing.
Most of the most-popular Snuggie parodies are pretty derisive. Parodies on YouTube describe the Snuggie as "ridiculous," "stupid," and "big ridiculous stupid piece of crap" and run from the profane to the merely clever: "We've all heard of the 'Snuggie,' but now there is a new product called 'Blanket!' It's a 'Snuggie' without holes!"
But Allstar Products Group, which makes the Snuggie and other as-seen-on-TV products like the "Perfect Brownie Pan Set," apparently thinks all this buzz is a good thing. The company grabbed some of the less-insulting parodies and posted them on the Snuggie Fan Club website, and it has announced the Snuggie Choice Film Awards - a request for "commercial, short film, documentary or parody" videos.
The winner will receive $5,000, a trip to New York City and maybe even the opportunity to produce or appear in a real Snuggie-brand commercial for 2011.
The Snuggie has a Facebook page and Twitter account, and the Snuggie Fan Club site lets you create and share an image of a friend wrapped up on a Snuggie.
Could social media become an effective way to sell odd products like the Snuggie, the Shamwow and other items traditionally marketed to insomniacs by bad actors, cheap production and a warning to "CALL NOW"?
A Snuggie infomercial parody posted on YouTube, now reposted on an official Snuggie website.
Quick - you have 140 characters to say something witty, include a link and disclose the fact that the company you're tweeting about happened to give you a free sample of the product so you could give it a whirl. What do you do?
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association says you should use #samp, one of three new hashtags it has adopted specifically for this purpose, which tells everyone you received a sample of what you're tweeting about.
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The WOMMA released a set of guidelines this month in response to last months Federal Trade Commission adoption of a guide on endorsements and testimonials in advertising.
According to WOMMA's Social Media Marketing Disclosure Guide (.pdf), the FTC requires a disclosure of all "material connections". It defines these connections as any connection that could "affect the credibility consumers give to that blogger's statements."
The three hashtags that WOMMA is proposing are #spon for sponsored tweets, #paid for paid tweets and #samp for when the blogger received a sample.
Depending on how you approach this, you can either use it as an AdBlock opportunity and make sure none of these sorts of tweets get through to you, you can go out and seek them, or you just be aware of what you're clicking on and why it was suggested.
We're not sure we'd necessarily recommend filtering out these tweets, though. A quick search for #spon on Twitter revealed some great links. Remember, these are not necessarily just terrible ads, like you might be force fed on some website, they're just tweets where the tweeter is disclosing the full background. As more and more people are getting paid to tweet, we hope these tags will make that more clear.
With companies like McDonalds, Michelin, Dell and Porter Novelli using WOMMA guidelines, we're willing to bet you're about to start seeing these tags more and more.
If the latest numbers from online ad network Chitika are anything to go by, then we may well be on our way to the world of Idiocracy. According to the study, which compared click through rates to college education, the less educated your audience, the more likely they are to click through on an advertisement.
While this may be good news for some, it certainly seems to spell doom for supporting intelligent content through advertising.
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The two states with the lowest click rate were Massachusetts and Washington, while the state with the highest click-through rate was West Virginia. These correlate very strongly, according to Chitika's blog post, with the education rates in those states.
The study works with stats on a large scale, comparing click through rates with education rates for entire states. The blog quotes Daniel Ruby, research director for Chitika, as saying that this should be taken as an opportunity.
"Obviously, if you're targeting a more educated demographic, you need to do a better job of making your ad worthwhile," says Ruby. "This, like everything, is an opportunity to push the industry towards the idea of content first, sales pitch second, even among advertisements."
We fear that far too often, things like this work in the other direction and content follows the money, not vice versa.
Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is supported by advetisers who have realized this and are targetting our unusualy educated audience & influential audience. 73% of respondents to our recent readers' poll have an advanced or undergraduate degree, over 46% have significant or final authority over IT purchasing decisions, and our advertisers target their ads accordingly. We believe that our readers are also unusually attractive and smell extra sweet, but we have only anecdotal evidence of that.
There have been a lot of posts about how HTML5 is great for website development. The subtler, yet more interesting story about HTML5 is that it has incredible potential to make advertising both rich and scalable, especially as publishers and advertisers grapple with the requirement to serve slick creative to all devices. As a result, the W3C standard that is "not ready for production yet" is gaining tremendous popularity on mobile and tablet devices and has become a major game changer for mobile display advertising.
The city of Philadelphia is demanding money from bloggers who were honest enough to report the meagerest - $11, $50 - of revenue from ads or donations.
The Snuggie has been 
Quick - you have 140 characters to say something witty, include a link and disclose the fact that the company you're tweeting about happened to give you a free sample of the product so you could give it a whirl. What do you do?
If the 