Earlier this month, agency JWT New York and Human Rights Watch tapped Limelight EyeWonder Interactive Advertising Services to power the rich media portion of a two-fold campaign designed to create awareness about human rights violations in Burma.

The EyeWonder-powered 300×250 expandable ad grabbed users’ attention by flashing words across the screen, detailing the plight of thousands of political prisoners in Burma. A representation of a Burmese prison with pens forming the cell bars encouraged users to remove the bar to sign a petition for the prisoners’ release. In its expanded state, the ad revealed a “sign now” button with a plea to President Thein Sein to release 2100 political prisoners. After signing the petition, users were greeted with a thank you and presented with additional opportunities to learn more by clicking through to the Human Rights Watch website or to share the ad on Facebook.

The thought-provoking campaign took home a Gold Pencil at One Show Design, a Grand Clio in design and two Gold Cubes at the 90th Annual Art Directors Club Awards.

Mobile is the new frontier and with roughly one billion mobile broadband subscribers around the globe, it offers rich new opportunities for advertisers.

As more publishers get on board with mobile monetization, we’re rapidly adding to our list of sites that support EyeWonder ad formats. Today we’re announcing integration with Microsoft’s premium mobile properties, including MSN, Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger and FoxSports.

“EyeWonder is a solid addition to our growing list of certified industry leading rich media solution providers,” said Raj Kapoor, Director, Global Product Planning & Marketing, Mobile, Local & Commerce. “EyeWonder not only brings a growing global footprint but a robust portfolio of both online and mobile rich media solutions as well. EyeWonder is excited to be working with us and we believe our partnership will strengthen our multi-screen story by allowing us to deliver highly interactive and engaging ad experiences for Microsoft’s premium properties on the PC and mobile.”

These mobile landing spots support EyeWonder expandable and non-expandable banners, as well as standard and click-to-video ad varieties.

With this new initiative, advertisers will have access to the most robust and unique mobile ad formats, providing them the opportunity to reach and engage audiences worldwide across mobile and connected devices.

Want to see an example? Check out this demo of a click-to-video ad, best viewed on a mobile device. It’s the type of interactive format that’s now available in media buys targeting Microsoft’s mobile advertising inventory.

Interested in finding out more about EyeWonder mobile ad formats on Microsoft properties? Read Microsoft’s blog post here.

Like many other folks in the industry, we’ve been out at Streaming Media East this week, and yesterday, a discussion during a panel on online video advertising caught our attention. An audience member asked if it was time to do away with the banner ads that accompany a large number of online video commercials. Advertisers like these companion banners because they reinforce the video ad message, but they can also be intrusive, and sometimes consumers find they detract from the primary content on offer.

The SME panel members debated the companion ad issue and came up with two good points. First, these banner ads persist even after a video ad has finished, and that persistence will continue to be valuable to advertisers. However, second, the practice of adding companion banner ads started in large part because advertisers needed an effective vehicle for creating a call to action. Video ads were not originally clickable. Now that they are, it’s creating new opportunities.

Yaniv Axen of SundaySky said he’s seen ten times the response rate with clickable video ads compared to companion banner ads. And Gina Smilanksy of Aegis Media suggested that companion ads could be replaced in some instances with interactive pre-rolls.

As technology changes, so does ad industry practice. It’s always important to evaluate new options. New practices may produce better results

It’s that time again, and in case you missed it, we announced first quarter earnings for Limelight Networks late on Thursday. Here are some of the highlights.

• Revenue of $49.8 million in Q1
• Delivering 2.5 billion objects hourly
• Storage capacity of 11+ PB
• 11+ billion online add impressions served in Q1
• Mobile internet and tablet computing revenue growth approximately 300% year-over-year
• Online video platform growth approximately 100% year-over-year
• Site and application acceleration services growth exceeded 100% year over year

Will Richmond of VideoNuze posted two successive articles yesterday and today on the topic of online video advertising. The first cites research released by BrightRoll, which suggests strong enthusiasm for online video ads in 2011. According to BrightRoll’s survey of media buyers, 65 percent of respondents plan to shift budget from TV advertising to online video ads this year.

Meanwhile, 28 percent of respondents believe online video will see the largest spending increases in 2011, with a close 27 percent predicting that mobile video advertising will pick up the largest gains.

Following the BrightRoll report, Will Richmond also wrote today on YouTube’s predictions around online video ad pricing and measurement between now and 2015. According to company product manager Baljeet Singh, within the next four years, 50 percent of video ads will include cost-per-view video. The idea is that advertisers will only have to pay for ads that actually engage users – in other words ads that consumers choose, or at least choose not to skip.

Richmond points out that cost-per-view video ads will ratchet up the pressure on advertisers to produce better creative. Perhaps more importantly, however, with better response metrics, these types of ads will also become a much more compelling option for advertising budgets. If media buyers are shifting to online video ads as fast as BrightRoll and others forecast in 2011, just imagine what the landscape might look like in 2015 when advertisers have a better way to measure ROI.

Online advertising has made a living off the click-through rate, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that CTR is a fairly meaningless standard of measurement. In a recent study by Collective, the firm found that CTR had no correlation with brand awareness, brand opinion, or purchase intent. Although Collective calls the study preliminary, it’s basing its conclusions on the analysis of advertising interactions driven by more than 100 million anonymous user profiles in the first months of 2011. That’s no small data set. And the most damning statistic? Ninety nine percent of users each month never click on an ad at all. In other words, only one percent of the population bothers to click on an ad ever. That’s a big audience that many online advertisers are not credited with reaching. Perhaps it’s time to move to more sophisticated metrics.

Limelight EyeWonder Interactive Advertising Services include extensive tracking and reporting features for online ad campaigns. These cover video and non-video interactions, as well as summary reports over time. This is nothing new. However, recently we’ve also added in new AdWonder Ad Visibility Metrics for a more granular look at your brand exposure.

These metrics include:

• Total Visible Time (seconds)
• Average Visible Time (seconds)
• Visible Time to Brand Exposure Time
• Total Time Viewable (in 20% increments)
• Unique Ad Views (in 20% increments)
• Average Position on Page (pixels)
• Average Scroll Position on Page (pixels)
• Average Visible Browser Width, Height and Area (pixels)
• Unique Ad Views by Browser Width and Height (pixels)

Sometimes you just need a little something to get the creative juices flowing. Here are three EyeWonder ad campaigns that used different incentives to motivate a direct response from consumers.

Free Gift from Victoria’s Secret

Everybody likes free stuff, which is why Victoria’s Secret offered a free gift in its online banner ad urging people to sign up to become a member of Pink Nation. Users had to input a first name, last name and email address to join the Pink Nation club and earn a Victoria’s Secret secret surprise. See ad demo here.

Summer Drink Recipes from TheBar.com

When TheBar.com wanted to drive traffic to its website, the company enticed consumers with a simple cocktail recipe, and an invitation to learn about more drink concoctions online. After the click-through, TheBar.com offered up drink recipes by type, occasion, brand, and more. See ad demo here.

Song Submissions for a Secret Summer Radio Station

Combining the secret and summer themes, the Secret brand of deodorant encouraged consumers to express themselves (part of a campaign for its Scent Expressions) by submitting favorite summer songs for a customized, beach-appropriate radio station. By filling in an artist name in the ad banner’s input field, consumers were able to share their music likes and get a tailored reward in return. See ad demo here.

DIGIDAY has released the results of a recent survey sponsored by YuMe (but conducted independently), and the news for online video advertising is decidedly good. More than 45% of the 225 agency and advertiser respondents said they expect to increase their digital video ad spend this year. Even better, if you work out the calculations, roughly 5%  of those 225 respondents are adding money to their overall spend in order to hit digital video. That’s instead of stealing the dollars from somewhere else. Extrapolating out from this (admittedly) small survey, we should see more revenue from online video ads and the ad market as a whole in 2011.

Most advertisers are looking at digital video ads to increase brand awareness and engagement, and that certainly jives with the way we’ve seen video successfully used in marketing campaigns. However, some publishers aren’t on board with video advertising yet because they’re afraid it still lacks reach. That may be true now – although it’s arguable – but adoption is growing. More connected media devices, including smartphones and tablets, mean more opportunity for consumers to watch video online. And even though publishers have to support a number of platforms in order to reach a wide mobile audience, that too is not an insurmountable challenge. In fact, it’s rather easy if you have access to the right tools.

As a side note to the DIGIDAY study, a recent survey of 415 smartphone users conducted by ad agency MGH found that consumers are increasingly using QR codes to access information about products. A full 32% of respondents to the survey had used a QR code, and nearly a quarter of that group had scanned a QR code in order to access online video.

In a recent webinar with MarketingProfs, we ran out of time before addressing all of the questions from the audience. Here’s a condensed version of what was left over (some questions have been combined), along with answers from our own Sandy Shanman.

Sometimes rich media can slow down or crash computers of customers with older machines. Are there any ways to balance that out and not lose/annoy those customers?

Yes! This is one of the primary arguments for web acceleration services. A content delivery partner can help you optimize the site experience for your users by improving performance in the network, and therefore taking a lot of the burden off the end-user’s device. Even if an old PC doesn’t render media as quickly as a new one would, the performance gains from network delivery optimization help to make up the difference and create the richest experience for consumers. In addition, techniques like adaptive bit-rate streaming respond to users’ connection settings to deliver media at a quality level that their individual devices can handle. An older computer on a low-bandwidth Internet connection might not be able to handle HD video, but with adaptive streaming it can still access the same video at a lower bit-rate.

Beyond web acceleration, there are numerous ways to improve site performance to make sure a media-heavy site doesn’t leave some customers behind. Examples include improving the underlying code (combining scripts and stylesheets, optimizing site search, etc.), and making sure to compress every file on your site – even the smallest objects. This is something you can do on your own, or we offer site optimization services including site Health Checks.

How should publishers deal with premium content and issues of content theft? What is the best way to deliver video content securely to purchasers and end-users?

The best way to secure content is to use encryption and authentication. Among our content security services, we offer Media Vault, which embeds an authentication code into your URL. Only authorized users can then access the content on that page. Other features with the service include the ability to authorize only specific IP addresses or blocks of addresses, and the ability to set a time window when access is allowed.

Can HTML5 emails by read by mobile phones?

It depends on the mobile phone. For those that don’t support HTML emails, you should offer text-only versions. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t still make use of rich media. Our Limelight REACH service creates a Universal URL for any media content you want to use, and that link can be embedded in text emails, SMS messages, and anywhere else. The Universal URL automatically detects what type of device an end-user has and provides media playback tailored to that device. If the phone has a web connection, it will be able to access your rich-media content.

With the growth of Android/iPhone market, where does that leave the traditional BlackBerry user?

BlackBerry devices still make up a large percentage of consumer smartphones, which means publishers can’t afford to bypass the platform. ComScore’s latest report still puts BlackBerry market share in the US at close to 29%. That’s an audience too big to ignore.