Unified Flash and HTML Content Management and Campaign Tracking
Adobe Flash—a favorite tool of ad agencies—blends everything the Internet has to offer into a single, interactive web experience. Because it is a cutting edge tool, however, not everyone is capable of experiencing a Flash site.
Many web sites avoid using Flash so they can reach the greatest audience. Others forego the greater audience for the sake of delivering the best experience to the Flash-enabled. The most ambitious web developers, however, attempt to create dual Flash and HTML web sites to support both kinds of visitors.
When JWT—the ad agency for the United States Marine Corps—sought to create truly equivalent experiences for Marine recruits and their families, they looked to the Valtira to meet that need.
The Flash Challenge
Flash combines movies, images, and text into an interactive, animated environment that creates a richer web site experience for visitors. Professionals creating web sites in Flash, however, must deal with the following issues:
Text is embedded in the Flash file. As a result, Flash programming skills are generally required to make content changes to a Flash web site. Flash is not as accessible for users with disabilities as normal web sites. Flash sites often require higher bandwidth connections or they feel slow. The Two Site Approach When building a web site in Flash, developers will commonly create an "HTML-equivalent" web site. Without a centralized place for managing your web content, however, the "HTML-equivalent" web site is a second place where you have to remember to make changes. Every time you make a change to the Flash, you must make the same change over in the HTML site. Eventually these sites fall out of sync and the HTML becomes an inferior companion.
Control the Message through Valtira
Valtira empowers you to control messages across multiple channels. It provides a unified content repository for sites like www.marines.com that desire a true HTML equivalent for the Flash. Content authors use the Simplicis browser interface to edit site content and upload images and other media assets. Those changes immediately show up in both the Flash and HTML versions of the web site without the need for the content author to know either Flash or HTML.
Campaign Management
The web is a critical piece of the Marines recruiting strategy. Recruiting campaigns drive parents and recruits to the site and Valtira measures the results. Valtira's WebTrends integration extends their metrics and analytics capabilities even further.
More than simple tracking, Valtira campaign management enables the Marines to deliver custom imagery depending on what campaign led the visitor to the site.