Yahoo Living Ads – rich media ad format of the future?

Yahoo’s Livestand isn’t available in the UK (yet), but as the Internet giant’s answer to the likes of Flipboard and Zite I figured it would be well worth playing around with it through my US iTunes account.

A week ago Yahoo lit up the industry wires with releases about their new ad format – “Living Ads” – that debuted on Livestand with a flagship Toyota Prius ad. Priced north of $200,000 the ad format is intended to deliver rich, interactive advertisements spotting video and deep usage of the device’s features like touch, accelerometer, etc.

Finally the immersive, rich ad experience that we are all hungering for on the tablet? Something that could deliver the broad adoption of deep rich media by advertisers and deliver deep, meaningful brand engagement (the kind that can be measured and monetized) at the same time? The silver bullet in display advertising that works for advertisers and publishers alike?

Without seeing the backend of engagement/performance, my gut feel is: Not quite; unfortunately the ad (and format) manages both to overdue it AND to fall short at the same time.

The ad sits inconspicuously in the third column of the layout, and expands upon click to a full page experience. So far so good – nothing earth shattering or revolutionary, a behavior that is expected from many formats today. But that’s when things start spinning out of control.

Once the full page experience has opened with a short animated film sequence, every element no the screen appears to be in slow motion – yet irritatingly instead of in a complete, smooth animation loop, the sequence undergoes a hard reset every 15 seconds. This makes the animation look like it’s stuck like a broken record. This could be a whole lot smoother.

Interactivity is a key theme for these ads – yet there is no clear indication where any hotspot is (and equally important – which hotspot progresses the “storyline” of the ad versus simply showing a little stat about the new Prius). To prevent a frustrated reader from hammering completely aimlessly on the ad to try and locate one of these hot spots, the initial opening animation contains a sequence of a few rings and hand symbols outlining where to tap – but you better remember all these hotspots in 2 seconds, because their location isn’t shown to you again.

Then again – don’t even bother trying to find the hotspots; the response elicited from the system is so mundane and superficial that the hunt for additional hot spots quickly loses its appeal.

All in all the ad feel unpolished, poorly thought through in what it wants to accomplish for the reader, and a tad too glitzy and shiny – in love with the form factor and capabilities yet completely missing a real value to the user.

Of course, a lot of the falling down could be in the execution of this specific ad – not necessarily the “living ad” format as a whole.

This leaves the question – what exactly IS the core of Yahoo’s “new” ad format? I fail to see any ground breaking innovations that can’t be accomplished with an existing rich media toolkit today. Where are revolutionary ways to interact with the content, exciting new ways to guide an interested person through the narrative, and most importantly – where is the data innovation? Hosted in an app that requires me to have a Yahoo or Facebook login to even get started, I would have hoped for some rich double-blind data sharing that instantly makes the ad more relevant to me and who/where/what I am (of which some I might have admittedly missed since my IP address is located in London).