Ad serving company DoubleClick announced today that their Rich Media and Video services are powering eight of the top ten current box office releases. Among the releases currently using their services include: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Knocked Up, Shrek the Third, Spider-Man 3, Bug, 28 Weeks Later and Waitress. You can check out a sample of the recent ads here.With trailers among the most consumed and searched for video content on the web, tightly integrating that content directly into the advertisements has become a basic requirement for launching a theatrical release. DoubleClick released a report a few months back that showed a sizable increase in click-throughs with video served within advertisements (you can read their study data here). Given Google's recent $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick, it is likely that some element of their ad serving and rich media technologies will eventually become accessible to smaller distributors as well. While even today anyone can place video and audio ads via Google’s Adwords system, the dynamic, rich advertisements that the studios are currently using aren’t possible through current self-service tools.
