MWSF - Macromedia Keynote Announces Advertising Alliance, Shows Cool Animations

by , 4:00 PM EST, January 12th, 2001

Rob Burgess, CEO of Macromedia, gave Thursday's keynote speech at this week's MACWORLD Expo. Things started off with a humorous Flash video titled "Internet Killed the Video Star", a spoof of the famous video "Video Killed the Radio Star". You can see it at the Shockwave.com Web site. We then took a trip down memory lane, with Rob reviewing Mac multimedia products, starting with VideoWorks (circa 1985) and progressing to Director and other products. After Director 3.1, Macromedia then decided to make products for the PC market as well, but Rob assured us that they only did it for the money.

Macromedia also offered some impressive statistics about Flash. There are almost 1 million Flash developers, as well as 1 million DreamWeaver users. There were 230 million downloads of the Flash player in Q3 2000, and over 1 billion total downloads of the Flash Player. Despite the popularity of the Flash platform, there is much work to be done to offer the benefits of it to the web, especially in the area of web advertising. The basic problem, quite frankly, is that most banner ads (non-Flash, of course) aren't that great. Currently, about 1% of web ads are in Flash.

To help address this situation, Macromedia announced the creation of the Macromedia Flash Advertising Alliance, with founding members AOL, CNET, DoubleClick, TBWA\Chiat\Day NY, 24/7 Media, and Unicast. One of the first deliverables is the Flash Tracking Kit, allowing creators of Flash content to measure the effectiveness of their efforts.

Other initiatives include MacroMedia University, which offers online training for $10/hour on many MacroMedia products. There's also DreamWeaver Exchange, which has over 270 or so free extensions, which have been downloaded over a million times. They Recently launched similar Flash Exchange, which already has 67 free extensions.

Also shown were OS X versions of their latest products, such as FreeHand, DreamWeaver and FireWorks, so we should expect them to be available shortly after the release of OS X. They closed the keynote with the premiere of a nice Flash creation with a medley of Pink Floyd tunes, which you can view by clicking here.

Macromedia