Hello.

Okay, guys and girls, this is my first post at blogger. Eventually if I have time, I might move to host this myself on WordPress on my own server, but that is, of course, if I have time. =)

There're lots and lots of topics I'll write about, I think. My main areas of interest are technology, entrepreneurship, Chinese history and literature (I'll be first to admit I'm much less learned in this respect than I hope to be), classical music and other musical styles (Jazz, pop, blah blah blah), the nba, social observations and somewhat philosophical ramblings. If you're interested in none of these, try to stay tuned still. I hope I'll be able to throw in a curve ball once in a whlie.

Now check out this screenshot:



Let me dive into a little context of this screenshot. I was watching a TV episode on abc.com. In general, I think they've done a great job mixing in advertising in a relatively unobtrusive way. The tempo feels right: they serve you ads in a similar timeline as your TV viewing by dividing an 50-minute episode into 5 or 6 chunks, and in between each chunk, they show you ads that you can skip out of after 30 seconds. In this way, they have set up similar expectations for content and ads online and offline.

The interesting part is how they've thrown in an interactive Flash game shown above as one of the ad segments. Kid you not, I spent 5 minutes on this snowball fight game. The hard part was trying to map mouse movements to arm movements on the LHS character. The RHS character is controlled by the game and likes to throw misses to keep you in the game.

Bottomline, we're seeing much more interactive and immersive ads than ever before.

Whether it be games or an immersive branded virtual world, like in Second Life or a custom Flash page that Geico built in an early Facebook ad that I saw a couple months ago. In the Geico example, it shows a party scene of cavemen, where you can look around at stuff inside the room and interact with them.

How about a little bit fun with ads?