Rich media advertising has been lurking in the wings for the past few years as an online advertising solution, but it has also suffered the slings and arrows of being a new technology. It has had to slowly shift the online advertising paradigm by providing advertisers with results that went far beyond the question of "Did the user click on the banner or not?" and show that the effectiveness of online advertising can be much more than the one-trick pony of click-through that GIF banners offer advertisers.

However, with the advent of new and improved advertising technologies, rich media has developed into a popular format for reaching and engaging consumers because the technologies allow the consumer to interact with the creative asset. Simply put, rich media refers to online advertising that makes use of a range of interactive digital media including streaming video and audio. The ads usually change as a user's mouse passes over.

For online marketers to be able to meet marketing needs, we offer a caveat - evaluate from them whether they have the need to first have an audience that is unafraid of their advertising. Also we jointly assess whether to offer users something of value in exchange for the users' time and attention. Add to that the potential to defer the marketing until a time when the user is willing to follow up on the marketing message, and you've got something that starts to emerge as an online marketing solution. This is the nature of rich media advertising.