Can Silverlight do RIA ads? With a world first for Mass Effect 2 I think yes.
So. What a month… ok, ok and a bit, to my ever suffering Account and Project Managers.
We (Metia in partnership with Ad:Dynamo and Microsoft Advertising) have created the world’s first ad-served expandable Silverlight ad to showcase Mass Effect 2 for EA. Showing on the Tech and Gadgets page of MSN UK from today it will be up for at least three weeks and will be on the MSN UK homepage tomorrow (Jan 30).

Still from Mass Effect 2 Silverlight expandable ad
So an ad’s an ad right? Fighting, hustling, cajoling for your sacred click traffic. Constantly getting in your face or just outright ignored?
Well here’s my ever optimistic opinion that what we’ve done showcases how smarter, more interesting and simply more content rich advertising could work. Provided advertisers are happy to expand their concept of what constitutes sane amounts of servable content
Effectively what the ad provides is a microsite’s-worth of high quality content right in the ad that gives you more than that scant sniff of content you’ve come to expect on this side of your valued click. It treats you with an experience that gives you reason to click through. And it’s that that I think provides the value. Warm leads, not cold, half interested leads.
So fun techy stuff: exactly what does it serve up?
- 4x Smooth Streamed HD quality videos up to 3 minutes in length
- Mass Effect 2 cinematic trailer
- Adept Class video
- Engineer Class video
- Mass Effect gameplay promotional trailer
- 1x Smooth Streamed Deep Zoom image with 3 layers at a 1:1 pixel size equivalent of 5600×3929
- 1x Smooth Streamed Ambient Audio track of around 3 minutes in length
- 18 zipped JPG images between 1280×720 and 1920×1200
- Mass Effect in-game screenshots and wallpapers
- All media can be fullscreened, videos are shown with branded and linked letterboxing

Expanded view

DeepZoom to man-stubble in full effect

Video player open
How does this pass as an ad? It breaks down into the usual polite expandable ad shells like this:
- 40kb initial ad .xap download (the footprint content preloader)
- 600kb secondary ad content .xap download (the ad UI, supporting dlls and code)
- All media content is streamed in or user initiated progressive download in the case of the screenshot / wallpaper imagery
Even after looking at it load 300 times a day for the last two weeks I’m still surprised at just how quickly it loads.
Our full team at Metia consisted of (alphabetically):
- Colin / Sam – Project Manager
- Damon – Silverlight Developer (Damon’s post here)
- Dean (me) – Interactive Lead
- Mark – Silverlight Tech Lead
- Sarah – Writer
- Stephen – Visual Designer
- Stuart – Interactive Designer
- Tina – Account Director
- Toni – QA
With very welcome help from James, Rachel, Mark, Richard, Ciara, Gavin and Karen.
At Ad:Dynamo Clive did some serious heavy lifting with the help of his team.
We’ve learned a lot in the relatively short time we’ve had with it. I’m planning a short series of posts to follow up that will look at some of the really interesting aspects we butted up against. Including Smooth Streaming Deep Zoom (really not much out there about it), our experience with Deep Zoom sub-image manipulation and CPU and frame rate optimisation.
Yep, so quite a bit in there. How expensive is that bandwidth going to be? Well that’s entirely dependant on how much users interact with it and the more they interact with it the warmer a lead they become, in theory anyway. We’ll see just how the numerous daily users to MSN throw themselves at it. I’m keen to see exactly what the outcomes are, it is an experiment after all, but I’m confident it will prove itself.
Would love to hear everyone’s comments or experiences with it, good or bad. If you don’t get to see it I’ll be posting a link to a permanent version shortly.
Updates:








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