Danny Jiang, Partner, Development at JVST

My muse best comes when:  Everyone in the office is gone for the day.  It’s so much easier to concentrate on something when you have a quiet environment.

The secret to creating effective engagement online:  Good visual presentation is the most important element for creating engagement online.  As more and more advertisers are moving into online advertising, people grow accustomed to seeing banner ads everyday and they stop paying attention to them.  Your ads need to stand out from the crowd.  The more refreshing your ad looks, the easier it will be to catch visitors’ attention.  Call-to-action messaging is also crucial to driving traffic.  A strong call to action can improve click-through rate of a standard Flash banner, but a subtle call to action could harm the performance of any ad – even a Rich Media banner.

Future of Interactive Advertising:  Flash has always been the standard platform for online advertising, due to its compact file size and cross-platform compatibility. With the arrival of ActionScript 3.0 and Flash Player 9, developers are able to really push the envelope in Flash development.   Open source projects such as Papervision3D and FFilmation has made it possible for the community to create much more complex 3D animation and 3D games in Flash, without relying on videos or series of PNGs. Also, with all the cool new features in ActionScript 3.0 and MXML, it opens the door to all kinds of possibilities from dynamically drawing complex bitmap images at runtime, to tracking user motion with webcam. I think we’ll see some dramatic evolution in the next several years, and 2008 will be a very exciting year for the industry.

My favorite brand experience:  I did a Rich Media launch banner campaign for “Kane & Lynch: Dead Men”, and that’s my favorite one so far.  It was a very successful marketing campaign.