Chrome moves on without Flash. Finally.

Published on
September 10, 2015
Contributors
Kiri Tamte-Horan
kiri@vicimediainc.com

Kiri Tamte-Horan is the Director of Digital Operations at Vici, and oversees the stellar Philadelphia Operations team through the development, implementation, and reporting of all digital campaigns. Kiri has managed hundreds of campaigns spanning Display, Video, and Social platforms, and has generated countless calls and conversions for clients across the country. Kiri is certified in Google Tag Manager and Acquisio, as well as Google AdWords Fundamentals and Display Advertising. Additionally, Kiri has a certification from Disney Institute’s Leadership Excellence. Kiri was the campaign manager for an award winning Digital Campaign as awarded by the Maryland Tourism Council in 2015.

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Flash-based advertising has been around for a while, providing a way for digital advertisers to incorporate interactive, animated, and audio components into their ads. This type of advertising is often called "rich media creative" and often returns a higher CTR thanks to its ability to better engage a viewer. However, a huge player in the digital advertising world has decided it will no longer support Flash-based ads within its browser. And for good reason.

Crome logo Flash logo

Chrome does away with FlashEarlier this month, Google announced that the latest update of its popular Chrome browser will no longer support Flash-based ads. In a blog post by Google, they explain that Chrome was "designed to increase page-load speed and reduce power consumption by pausing certain plugin content." One of the biggest offenders? Flash. But Google won't just pause all Flash content. Flash video is still viewed as "important content" by the browser and will still play, just without all of the noisy ads surrounding it.This becomes a small setback for digital advertisers who are still creating and serving Flash-based ads. With one of the largest browsers out of the running (27% of market share) ad space inventory becomes even more limited. Advertisers who want to still serve Flash must allocate their impressions towards the remaining browsers who still allow the plugin: Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. But I called it a small setback for a reason. Many digital advertisers have moved on from Flash because there is a much faster, cleaner, and more widely accepted alternative.

html5 logo

HTML5 has become the new go-to for creating rich media creative because it works in almost the exact same way that Flash does, just without the slow load speed and malware vulnerabilities. Not to mention HTML5 can have the ability to go where Flash never could, mobile devices (a topic for another time).Digital advertisers have known of Flash's impending doom for a while. (At least we did. I'm sure everyone else did too....Bueller?) So it didn't come as a surprise to us when all of the big players began dropping Flash support. We have an array of tools available to create HTML5 ads, optimize them for mobile, and even convert Flash-based ads into HTML5. In the end, we are grateful for what Flash did for digital advertising, but we are very eager to move on. Goodbye Flash. We probably won't miss you, sorry.

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