December 18, 2025
21
minutes read
Your banners are loading; your audience isn’t. Rich media ads turn every impression into something people can swipe, play, shop or try, unlocking more attention, richer signals, and better business outcomes than flat display ever will.
Static banners still have their place, but they’re easy to scroll past. Rich media ads—expandable banners, interactive video, AR lenses, playable units—add movement, interaction and personalization to the same inventory you already buy. These don’t just look better; they give you more ways to earn attention, understand it and turn it into performance.
At the same time, targeting and measurement are changing fast. As third-party cookies lose value and more budget flows into programmatic, marketers are under pressure to prove what each impression actually did. Rich media display ads help here because they don’t stop at “was the ad seen?”—they tell you who hovered, swiped, expanded, played, shopped or completed an interaction. That extra layer of behaviour makes your optimization, attribution and creative decisions sharper.
This article walks through what rich media advertising is, how it stacks up against traditional display, and the 10 formats worth building into your next media plan. For each one, you’ll get a clear explanation, practical benchmarks, real-world use cases and ideas you can brief in tomorrow—so you can move from static banners to interactive formats with a clear sense of when and why they pay off.
💡 For a primer on native advertising, please see: Native advertising: a complete guide for marketers in 2026
Rich media advertising is any digital ad that lets users interact with it, rather than just view it.
⚡ If people can only look at it, it’s display. If they can do something with it, it’s rich media.
The IAB defines rich media as ad formats that users can interact with, in contrast to ads that are simply animated. In practice, that includes:
Google frames it similarly: rich media ads include advanced features like video, audio and other elements that encourage viewers to interact with the content.
So when we talk about rich media display ads or rich media banner ads, we’re really talking about a spectrum:
Rich media also unlocks richer tracking. Instead of just impressions and clicks, you can log:
💡 If you want a deeper technical dive into formats and measurement, as well as a proper ‘rich media ads definition’, this article sits alongside our guide: What are rich media ads? And how to boost site profitability with them.
Standard display still does a job: cheap reach, broad coverage, simple creative. Rich media adds another layer: interaction, time spent and richer signals you can plug into optimization.
Let’s look at the comparison along four practical dimensions.
Average CTR for static display remains low. Recent benchmarks put traditional banners around 0.1% CTR, while rich media banners typically sit higher, often in the 0.14–0.44% range. Other analyses show that rich media banners can deliver CTRs up to 267% higher than standard banners, depending on format and placement.
The gap widens further when you look at interactive video and CTV:
That difference is the core value of rich media: you’re no longer just buying impressions; you’re buying interaction.
⚡ Rich media isn’t a prettier banner. It’s a way to buy time and intent instead of just pixels.
Static display can show an image, headline and CTA. Rich media formats let you:
The IAB’s newer ad portfolio and guidelines explicitly accommodate rich media features—expansion, video, animation, AR/VR—within standard ad units, making them easier to deploy at scale.
Because rich media captures more signals, you can:
A few examples of the performance upside:
Those extra seconds and richer signals often show up as lower CPAs or higher ROAS when you benchmark against flat JPG banners.
Rich media used to mean custom builds and direct-sold inventory. That’s changed.
Most rich formats now ship as:
The IAB and major platforms have aligned specs so that rich media display ads can run programmatically across exchanges, not just through one-off publisher deals.Interactive CTV formats, shoppable overlays and dynamic creative are now supported by leading DSPs.
So from a media buying perspective, rich media isn’t a special case. It’s another lever you can pull inside your usual programmatic, OLV and social buying stacks.
⚡ If a placement can serve HTML5, video or native, it can probably run rich media—you just need the right specs and tags.
To make the differences even clearer, it helps to see rich media and traditional display side by side. The table below compares them on the things that matter most in planning—how people interact with them, what you can measure, and how easily they fit into your existing buying and optimization workflows.
Rich media formats are most useful when you match them to a clear objective: do you want time spent, qualified leads, direct sales, or upper-funnel brand impact?
The 10 formats below cover a full-funnel toolkit. Each is widely available through major platforms and ad servers, and each comes with practical ways to measure success.
You’ll also see how they fit a transparency-first, Open Garden approach like AI Digital’s, where creative, media and data are tightly connected.
💡 For more on that philosophy, see How AI Digital became the transparency leader of programmatic advertising.
⚡ Pick formats based on the job you need them to do, not on what looks flashiest in a mood board.
Expandable banners start life looking like a standard display unit—say a 300×250 or 970×250—then grow when the user interacts. The expand can happen on click/tap or hover, and the expanded state can host video, galleries, product cards, forms, or even simple configurators.
From a media buying perspective, they still use familiar IAB sizes and can be trafficked through standard ad servers. The difference is the second state: a larger canvas (sometimes full-width) that only appears for people who show intent.
⚡ Think of expandables as landing pages that never make users leave the page they’re already on.
Expandable banners perform well because they interrupt the scroll in a controlled way and reward curiosity. Once someone notices the unit, the expanded state gives you a second chance to explain and persuade.
When you report on expandable banners, it helps to zoom in on how many people chose to engage and what they did in the expanded panel. These are the core numbers most teams watch:
Many campaigns see expand rates in the low single digits, but those interactions are high intent: users who expand often spend several seconds inside the unit and are much more likely to click through than average viewers.
One BMW campaign promoting a “change your car every 12 months” offer used interactive rich media banners with multiple “pages” inside a 300×600 and 970×250 unit. Each page highlighted different models; clicking a model opened more information before sending users to the site.
This kind of execution turns a standard skyscraper into a mini showroom:
According to multiple rich media providers, automotive clients like BMW consistently see higher interaction and post-click engagement from these formats than from static banners, because users can pre-filter models and offers in the ad itself.
To make expandables pay off, treat the expanded state like a compact landing page rather than an afterthought. A few practical habits go a long way:
Interactive video ads take standard pre-roll or mid-roll and add clickable or tappable elements: hotspots, product cards, branch choices, polls, overlays, and QR codes. They can run as online video (OLV) across desktop and mobile or as interactive CTV units on streaming platforms.
The basic idea: instead of just watching, viewers can do things inside the video—learn more, choose content, or shop.
⚡ The moment someone clicks inside your video, it stops being a view and starts being a behaviour you can learn from.
Interactive video works because it turns a passive viewing moment into an active choice. Instead of just counting views, you’re inviting people to lean in, click and explore.
As mentioned earlier, Innovid’s CTV creative benchmarks have shown that interactive CTV formats can deliver: 600%+ higher engagement vs standard, non-interactive pre-roll and completion rates above 95% on average.
Separate shoppable/interactive video analyses report significantly better performance over standard formats:
For an EV launch, BMW and agency partners built an interactive video “showroom” experience where viewers could click different parts of the car to see overlays about features, specs and pricing, each with CTAs back to the BMW site. The format generated significantly higher engagement rates (e.g. +33% engagement in one Smartzer campaign) compared with non-interactive video.
The best interactive video campaigns feel simple and obvious to use, even if the tech behind them is complex. These guidelines keep the experience intuitive and effective:
💡 For more on OLV & CTV, explore our dedicated guides: OLV advertising: a complete guide to boosting engagement n 2026 & Connected TV Advertising in 2025
Carousel ads are swipeable units with multiple “cards”—each card can have its own image or video, headline, description, and landing page. They’re native to Meta (Facebook/Instagram), LinkedIn, and some programmatic placements, and they’ve become one of the most reliable rich media examples for ecommerce and performance campaigns.
Carousels shine when you have more to show than fits in a single frame. By letting people swipe at their own pace, they act like a mini catalogue or storyboard inside one placement.
Meta’s own analysis of the carousel format found that (across advertisers):
Third-party analyses back this up: one 2024 review found Facebook carousel ads generating roughly 35% more clicks than single-image ads and 30% more than video in like-for-like tests.
⚡ Treat each card like its own ad—weak links in the sequence drag down the whole carousel.
Meta’s case studies include retailers who shifted from single-image to carousel ads to show multiple products.
Strong carousels are built card by card, not just as a single creative file sliced into pieces. Use these principles to keep the whole unit working as one coherent story:
Playable ads are bite-sized interactive experiences that let people “try before they buy”—originally famous in gaming, but now used by retail, finance, education and more. Gamified ads use similar mechanics (points, challenges, rewards) even if they aren’t literal games.
Think of a playable ad as a 30–60 second demo that runs in a banner or interstitial: tap to play, complete a challenge, then see a reward or CTA.
Playables and gamified units work because they trade attention for participation. When the ad itself is fun or useful, people stay longer and the clicks you get are more qualified.
Recent analyses show strong advantages:
⚡ If the game doesn’t naturally lead to your product, it’s a gimmick, not a playable.
While not a classic playable in the mobile game sense, Burger King’s “Whopper Detour” is a powerful gamified ad example:
https://youtu.be/0Lxsnfyg5Gc?si=3t-v8blQblRl14k4
The underlying principle—turning media and mobile interaction into a game with a clear reward—translates directly into gamified rich media ads.
Non-gaming brands use playables for product education:
With playables, small creative decisions have a big impact on completion and conversion. These rules help you keep the experience light, fast and tied to your actual offer:
Immersive formats—360° visuals, AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality)—let people step inside a scene or place your product into their own environment. This is one of the most striking families of rich media ads examples, and it’s now mainstream thanks to Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok and WebAR tools.
Immersive formats excel at showing context—how something looks, fits or feels in a real-world setting. That sense of “being there” is what pushes attention and intent beyond what flat media can do.
Snapchat’s multi-brand attention research with Amplified Intelligence and OMD found that:
Those are huge gains in both attention and brand impact.
Beauty and fashion brands like MAC, Sephora and Gucci have used AR try-on lenses and filters that allow users to:
Snapchat’s case studies highlight that AR try-on experiences significantly increase time spent with the brand and lift purchase intent and store traffic, especially for younger audiences who already use AR for fun.
The most effective AR and 360° ads solve a specific problem for the user, not just show off a 3D asset. Use these checks to keep your ideas grounded and practical:
Shoppable ads allow people to move from discovery to purchase without breaking context. They overlay or embed product information and purchase paths directly into the ad:
They’re now core formats across Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube and many retail media networks.
Shoppable ads are effective because they collapse the gap between inspiration and checkout. When discovery and purchase live in the same frame, fewer people fall out of the funnel.
⚡ Every extra tap between “I like this” and “I bought this” is a leak—shoppable formats simply plug more of them.
In short—shoppable video and interactive media bridge the gap between content and commerce:
eMarketer reports that TikTok Shop generated around $19 billion in global GMV in Q3 2025 alone, powered heavily by shoppable short-form video where each product is tagged and purchasable in-stream.
Brands selling beauty, fashion and home products use creators’ videos as rich media ads examples: viewers see the product in use, tap a product card, and complete purchase without leaving the app.
Pinterest’s performance marketing insights highlight that:
To get the most from shoppable formats, you need both strong creative and clean commerce plumbing. These are the basics worth nailing before you scale spend:
Native ads match the format and feel of their host environment—news feeds, editorial modules, social timelines. Native rich media builds on that foundation with video, animation, interactive graphics, quizzes, or mini tools embedded in the content.
Think: a sponsored article with a scroll-triggered data visualization, or an in-feed unit that expands into a short interactive explainer.
Native rich media works by matching the tone of the surrounding content while still giving people something extra to do—watch, scroll, compare, calculate or explore. That balance tends to earn more honest attention.
Native has strong evidence behind it:
When you layer rich media on top—video, animations, interactive graphs—dwell time often increases again.
While not brand-sponsored, the New York Times’ interactive dialect quiz shows the potential of interactive native content:
For brands, similar quiz or assessment units can be sponsored rich media native ads, driving high engagement and first-party data collection.
Native units live or die on the strength of the content. These pointers help keep your native rich media useful enough that people forget they’re looking at an ad:
💡 For more on native video advertising, please see: Native video advertising: Types, examples, best practices
Dynamic retargeting uses user-level data—what people browsed, added to cart, or researched—to show personalized ads featuring those exact products or content. When you combine this with rich media (carousels, expandables, video), you get units that are both relevant and interactive.
Dynamic retargeting performs well because it doesn’t start from zero: it builds on what people have already done. Adding rich media on top simply gives those warm prospects more relevant ways to re-engage.
⚡ Dynamic creative is just good manners—show people what they actually cared about last time, not what you wish they cared about.
Retargeting in general is a proven performance lever:
When you wrap those product recommendations inside carousel or expandable rich media ads examples, you give users more to do with that relevance.
Criteo’s commerce-focused dynamic retargeting shows users products they’ve recently browsed or left in their cart, in formats like carousels and adaptive display. A good example is UK luxury streetwear label Represent Clothing. Criteo helped the brand retarget past site visitors across the open internet and Meta inventory (Instagram and Facebook) with personalized dynamic ads built from Represent’s catalog.
At a more aggregate level, Criteo’s Dynamic Creative Optimization+ benchmarks show that dynamically personalized creatives can drive around 80% higher click-through rates and up to 150% higher conversion rates compared with static image ad campaigns.
The risk with retargeting is overuse and repetition, not the format itself. These practices help you stay on the right side of relevance rather than crossing into irritation:
Interactive infographics turn static charts and diagrams into explorable experiences:
They sit at the intersection of content marketing and rich media display ads.
Interactive infographics are effective when people need to understand numbers, trade-offs or scenarios, not just read a headline. Letting users poke at the data themselves keeps them on the page longer.
Interactive content has strong engagement data:
Spotify Wrapped is essentially a personalized interactive infographic that drops into people’s feeds every December. It takes a full year of listening data and turns it into a swipeable story: panels that show top artists and songs, total minutes listened, “music personalities”, and playful mini-games like Sound Town or Me in 2023. Each card is designed like an infographic tile—bold typography, motion, colour blocks and simple charts—so users tap through, discover their own stats, then share their favourites to social.
The scale is huge:
Brands don’t need Spotify’s engineering muscle to borrow the pattern—anyone with a meaningful dataset (loyalty, usage, purchase histories, even B2B product usage) can package it into a snackable, animated “year in review” that behaves like a rich media ad and a piece of content people feel proud to post.
Because these pieces sit between content and ads, they need structure from both worlds. Keep these principles in mind when you brief or review interactive visuals:
This category includes:
These are deeply embedded in how people actually use social platforms day-to-day, making them some of the most “native-feeling” rich media examples available.
Social AR and interactive Stories perform well because they plug into behaviours people already enjoy—playing with filters, tapping through updates and voting on quick questions. The ad rides along with those habits instead of fighting them.
The data’s compelling:
In Instagram’s own case studies, Dunkin’ was one of the first brands to test interactive poll stickers in Stories ads. The creative itself was simple: short video clips overlaid with a poll sticker asking people “How do you like your coffee?”, inviting them to tap their preference.
This illustrates how even low-lift interactivity—just a single question—can improve both performance metrics and customer insight without adding much production overhead.
To feel native, these formats have to respect the culture of each platform and the speed of the feed. Use these guardrails to keep your concepts simple, on-brand and easy to participate in:
💡 Interested in learning more about Netflix advertising? Check out our dedicated piece: Netflix advertising: The future of streaming TV ads
Rich media advertising isn’t about adding bells and whistles for the sake of it. Used properly, these formats give you three things static display can’t match:
Across the formats we’ve covered, the pattern is consistent: when people can interact, performance improves—whether that’s 2× engagement for interactive content or 10× CTR for retargeted units over generic display.
To make this work at scale, you need three ingredients:
That’s where AI Digital’s Open Garden model comes in. By combining unbiased supply, outcome-based optimization and full transparency, we help brands plug rich media into their existing programmatic, OLV and social activity without losing control of the details.
If you’re ready to turn these rich media ads examples into live campaigns:
⚡ The winners aren’t the brands with the fanciest units. They’re the ones who use rich media to ask better questions and act on the answers.
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Inefficiency
Description
Use case
Description of use case
Examples of companies using AI
Ease of implementation
Impact
Audience segmentation and insights
Identify and categorize audience groups based on behaviors, preferences, and characteristics
Automated ad campaigns
Automate ad creation, placement, and optimization across various platforms
Brand sentiment tracking
Monitor and analyze public opinion about a brand across multiple channels in real time
Campaign strategy optimization
Analyze data to predict optimal campaign approaches, channels, and timing
Content strategy
Generate content ideas, predict performance, and optimize distribution strategies
Personalization strategy development
Create tailored messaging and experiences for consumers at scale
Retail, ecommerce, fashion, beauty, gaming, entertainment, auto, travel and home goods tend to benefit the most, because their products are highly visual and people want to explore, compare or “try” them before buying. B2B and finance can also see strong results when they use rich media for explainers, calculators and assessments that educate and qualify prospects rather than just push a static message.
Production costs and CPMs are often higher, but the effective cost per result is usually lower when formats are well matched to the goal. Because rich media drives higher interaction, better-qualified clicks and stronger mid-funnel behaviour, brands often see lower CPAs, higher ROAS or better brand lift than they do from cheap but low-impact static banners.
Yes. Modern rich media is built to work with standard ad tech: HTML5 for display, VAST/VPAID or newer specs for video and CTV, and native units via SSPs and social APIs. Most major DSPs accept third-party rich media tags and can optimize on metrics like interaction rate, completion rate or dwell time instead of just clicks or views.
They are, and in many cases they perform best on mobile. Carousels, stories, AR lenses, playables and shoppable units are all mobile-first by design. The main constraints are file weight, load time and touch-friendly design, so creatives need to be lightweight, fast to load and easy to use on small screens.
Beyond impressions and clicks, the critical metrics are interaction rate (expands, swipes, plays), dwell time in the unit, completion rate for video or playables, viewability or attention, and the downstream KPIs that actually pay the bills, such as add-to-cart, leads, ROAS, CPA and brand lift where measured. The right mix depends on whether the campaign is aimed at awareness, consideration or direct response.
At minimum you need designers who can work in HTML5/social specs, someone to handle motion or basic video, and either a rich media vendor or front-end developer to build and QA the units. On top of that, you need ad ops to traffic and tag correctly, and analytics support to interpret interaction data and feed the learnings back into creative and targeting.
Rich media management is the process of planning, creating, trafficking, tracking and optimising interactive ad formats like expandables, interactive video, AR, and playables. It usually covers asset versioning, QA across devices, ad server setup, event tracking (expands, swipes, plays, dwell time), and ongoing optimization based on those interaction signals rather than just impressions and clicks.
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