We’re currently facing a serious skill shortage in the digital advertising world for HTML5 expertise. Why has this happened? Well, let’s just say we didn’t expect the shift from Flash to be so sudden and so all encompassing.
Over recent years, HTML5 has become increasing popular because you can’t run Flash on a lot of tablet devices or mobiles - due in good part to Apple blocking it on their iOS devices. HTML5 also allows you to offer more interactivity in principle because it’s code-based rather than an animation program. As a result, media agencies who wanted interactivity on their ads for mobile started to shift to HTML5.
It’s interesting the change we’ve seen in the industry in such a short time. At the beginning of this year, maybe 10 percent of the media we worked with would be HTML5 units, with the bulk of the workforce still involved in creating Flash banners. HTML5 was a small proportion of a client’s media schedule, with Flash taking the lead. This meant the amount of HTML5 ad building talent needed in each agency was smaller.
However, over the summer when Google and Mozilla switched off Flash in Chrome and Firefox, the media agencies stopped booking Flash ads altogether. A complete turnaround! Everyone knew it was going to come, but not as fast as it did. We expected a crossfade, a transition between Flash and HTML5, but instead we got what felt like someone turning off a light switch.
For ad production teams this meant that you have a lot of people in your team who can build Flash ads, but suddenly they aren’t appropriately skilled to create ads in what’s required - whether they’re bespoke HTML5 builds or built using the ad server tools.
Another problem is that the people most conversant with HTML5 are typically front end developers with a background in building web / mobile sites.
So now you’ve got a situation where those who have these skills are not really keen to work on banners, while those who do want to work on them don’t necessary have the new skills required. You can’t win. So what can you do?
Clients don’t always have the budget to pay for this new reality. They’ve been used to paying for Flash banner ads at a fairly commoditised rate, but all of a sudden a banner ad can now be costing two or three times what a Flash banner used to cost, because it happens to be hand-coded.
This is compounded by the fact that the HTML5 specifications from a lot of the media agencies are still not locked down, and are legacy-led from the days when Flash was prevalent. As a result, ads are being built and rejected because they don’t always fit the ad server slots. This has the effect of adding more QA and revision times, and again costs rise.
The question is, how will we all solve this?
The solution I think will come by focussing on the ad servers themselves, and by retraining people who have Flash experience on the application of those tools. It’s more work, but in the long-run it makes sense.
Over time the ad serving tools themselves will become more sophisticated and more streamlined. By training up large numbers of relatively junior team members, we’ll ensure they’ll learn their skill and trade and we’ll be able to offer volume to our clients and get the production done more quickly. Just like the way that you can use Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign to begin to design web banners and applications with Flash, the ad server tools will become an extension of the design package on your desktop.
By Chris Ball, head of digital at Hogarth Worldwide.
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