Flash banners vs. animated gif banners

April 11, 2009 12:06 PM

Flash banners vs. animated gif banners - the real pluses and minuses. What are they?

I typically use animated gif banners with clients, but would prefer to use flash, as it shows their beautiful product more effectively within file-size constraints. My clients have concerns that I need to address, and I am not getting dependable stats or info in my online searches.

1. How often are Flash banners blocked by individual users? Is Firefox the only browser I need to worry about or do I need to be concerned about other banner blocking software?

2. Are there any available numbers regarding the effectiveness of Flash banners vs. animated gif banners? Anything that indicates a higher level of clickthrough for one or the other?

As far as I can tell, most major, mainstream, corporate ads are flash. If these companies have selected to go this direction, it seems like they might have some good reasons. I just need to figure out what those reasons are. Anything else I need to know? Am I asking the right questions?

posted by chuke to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

1. Very rarely. The people who run flash or ad-blocking software (myself included) are a vocal lot, but we account for a very small portion of the overall internet.

2. I cannot answer this off-hand, but ad-serving companies (such as Eyeblaster) will have more than enough information to throw at your with this.

The vast, vast majority of served ads these days are in Flash. We push out a bucketload of banners of all shapes and sizes, as my workplace handles a fair bit of online media for movie companies. The advantages to Flash banners are numerous: much more flexible with size limits (particularly considering quite a few sites still stick to a 30k max), more interactive options (such as an interactive product gallery within your banner), flexibility with translation, and many other benefits that come with a "live" piece of Flash media versus a pre-rendered item such as GIF or JPEG.

The size thing is a particular advantage. As I mentioned above, you might find yourself battling against a 30K limit, but this often only applies to the initial load - sites with this restriction will accept "polite" banners, where a small banner is display with the page, and then the Flash banner can load in further content above the size limit once the page has finished loading. This is obviously useful for displaying stuff such as tv spots or movie trailers, as there's no way you'll fit that in 30K. Also, these sizes can mean you can find yourself crunching down the quality with a GIF banner, particularly if animated. Even if you still need to stick inside this limit on a Flash banner without polite loading, at least your text and other items will look crisp and will take little size.

You've also got the ability to have banners that actually display live information - such as eBay auctions for example - which you just really can't do (within reason) with GIF/JPEG banners.

Having said that, if you decide to go Flash, be a good citizen about it. Don't have banners that start with sound on by default (most sites won't allow this), and test your banners on lower-spec hardware to make sure they don't use an insane amount of CPU.
posted by sektah at 12:48 PM on April 11, 2009

The FlashBlock plugin will block all flash from appearing.

Reasons not to use flash:
-slows page load
-can steal mouse focus so that scrollwheel does not work, same with keyboard navigation. VERY ANNOYING.
-plugin is required

Reasons to use flash:
-if you need something interactive

I think you are right that a lot of companies are doing this, it's probably simpler to design, looks better and provides interactivity.

But in my opinion, if you want a user to enjoy using a site, avoid flash.
posted by Sonic_Molson at 12:54 PM on April 11, 2009

Personally, I find GIF banners much less annoying and would be more likely to click them.
posted by archagon at 1:50 PM on April 11, 2009

You can add interactivity to gif banners by using the "swapImgRestore" / swapimage html code.
posted by sandra_s at 2:02 PM on April 11, 2009

No flash on the iPhone, so you may lose that segment of the market (if it matters)
posted by bottlebrushtree at 2:26 PM on April 11, 2009

Some very vocal people really hate and despise Flash will block it and will curse any pages that has it. And good for them.

And good for you those people are in the vast minority.

This is only a single point for you, but I once ran an ad test where I took the exact same animated ad as a Flash and as an animated GIF and ran them for a month side by side. They had almost exactly the same number of impressions and response.

So do what looks best. Which is Flash since (ironically) it usually lets you present the material in a less annoying way without flashing text or blinking wombats or whatever. The file size and animation constrains in GIF lead to annoying jumpy, flashy animations that give web advertising the well deserved bad reputation. Most places that serve Flash will let you set a fallback image for people without the plug-in.

And lets face it, if someone is blocking ads, they're not going to see your ad no mater what you do, and you shouldn't be wasting impressions on people who don't want to see them.
posted by Ookseer at 2:49 PM on April 11, 2009

disclaimer: I work in online advertising

to 1: as Ookseer said - people who block ads won't care about the format and you shouldn't care about them - they will not click your banners, so all you lose is a little branding effect which is very likely to have negative connotation as they do not like advertising in the first place. Ignore them.
to 2: when using flash banners it's necessary on most sites to provide fallback banners in gif format for people without flash, so there's adserver data to compare performance: our overall numbers show flash is clicking a lot better (with very rare exceptions) and is generating more leads / orders / $insertconversiongoal. Also flash banners are looking so much better if created properly, smoother animations, better colors and you can generate more looks with a significantly smaller filesize, not even to mention any form of interactivity which just doesn't really work with gifs. Just pay attention to cpu load, nothing is more annoying than browsing the web with a slower computer and killing the system with 90% load from flash animations.
posted by starzero at 3:56 PM on April 11, 2009

This may be beyond the sophistication that you need, but Flash banners can also be programmed to fire their own tracking events (sending data to a system like Omniture, for instance), whereas a gif will rely on the ad serving network - if you're using one - to do the tracking.
posted by dammitjim at 8:29 PM on April 11, 2009

Anyone who cares enough to block animated GIF banners most likely will block Flash banners, and vice-versa. So I don't think it would make a difference, as far as who sees your ad.

I block both, personally.
posted by Afroblanco at 9:56 AM on April 12, 2009