28 Jan 10

MediaCom help launch world's first Silverlight Ad

At 3pm on 28/01/10 the first ever Silverlight ad was launched

At 3pm on 28th Jan 2010 the world's first ever Silverlight Ad Unit solution went live for the EA Games release, Mass Effect II. MediaCom TED (The Entertainment Division) worked collaboratively with Microsoft, Metia, and Ad-Dynamo throughout the project. Silverlight technology has been used to great effect for website builds since it's launch but never in an Ad Unit.

A suitable "off-the-shelf" Ad Server to run the campaign could not be found so the job was outsourced to a company in South Africa, who fully embraced the project and have delivered excellent service. Silverlight has allowed EA to embed almost 500mb of content into one format via the Smooth Stream technology that Silverlight offers. As you would expect, the experience of the ad will be optimised to your internet connection.

If you do not currently have Silverlight installed, you will receive a prompt to download the software update which takes a few secondss to run. The penetration of Silverlight is high in the UK as it was installed on all new windows computers at the turn of the year, but there is a large audience without Silverlight and this has been considered in the pricing structures.

The ad will be live on MSN's gaming channel for the next 3 weeks and look out for a Home Page takeover on Saturday 30th Jan.

Check out the world's first Silverlight Ad Unit here (live until Mid Feb 2010)

Mass Effect II has been touted as the best Xbox 360 game ever made, with an avg. metacritic of 96. Beating COD by 2 points.