Fictional Internet marketing guru Natalie knows that she'll always be expected to produce commercial content that is both cutting edge and accessible, that is up-to-date enough to not look obsolete, but without technical demands that will deter potential customers. She also needs to be flexible enough to produce content to fit different demands - from small, simple adverts to large, detailed, dynamic content at the heart of a webpage - and for a wide range of diverse clients and audiences. To give her the flexibility and capability that she needs, and to keep her work straightforward and efficient, she uses Adobe Flash.

Flash is, across all platforms, the standard internet technology for providing dynamic and interactive content. Whatever the service or product being advertised, Flash can provide the ideal style to suit. In many cases, online advertising will be bright and bold, using primary colours and animations or videos coupled with large, clear text to grab site visitors' attention.

We're all familiar with banners and adverts aligned along the right of the screen, often designed to draw the eye away from the content that the visitor to the page was originally seeking. But, although this high-intensity approach is the most widespread, it's just as easy for Natalie to produce more sedate, conservative advertisements if that's what the client requires and the audience expects; the internet is fundamentally presentation-oriented, and visual and audio styles should reflect what the user would expect to see, given the context of the site.

Small and simple content

Natalie has been commissioned to produce online adverts for an insurance company whose low premiums are aimed exclusively at the over 50s. The insurers will need banner ads that are going to be fill space at the top of a number of pages whose audience are predominantly older and tend to have limited computer experience, using the internet primarily to visit a few familiar sites and communicate with their family. There are two key issues that she needs always to bear in mind to ensure that the advert is as effective as possible.

Firstly, she needs to ensure that the banner is welcoming and engaging for the audience, bearing in mind that she's selling insurance on this occasion. There's no need for the advert to be flashy and dramatic - a simple, understated, clear design is more likely to be engaging for this audience. Natalie wants to create a banner with four images, one after the other, illustrating in simple, conservative colours and with large, clear text the company's message. She can construct these images in Adobe Photoshop, and transfer them directly to Flash, and with the latter it's easy for her to insert smooth transitions between the images and make the banner as appealing and stylish as she needs it to be.

Her second concern is more technical. She knows that the target audience for this commission is not going to be at the cutting edge of internet technology. They may often have limited hardware and a slower internet connection, and lack the most up-to-date software. In this respect, the transitions mentioned above become very important; Natalie could have created the banner as a video or animation, but by building a slideshow with Flash transitions, she lets the user's browser load each of the images one at a time. This markedly reduces the bandwidth demands of the advert, making it much more accessible to users who don't have the best or most modern technology.

High tech, high impact

Natalie has also received a commission from a new website, selling the latest video games to be downloaded directly from the site and providing reviews, previews and discussion boards. She'll be creating content for larger adverts to be hosted on pages that appeal to a very technical audience, one that's very familiar with their high-spec machines and expect an impressive marketing campaign if they're going to be persuaded to try a new service.

Of course, finding the right style for the right audience is just as important for this advert as it was for the insurance banner, as different as the style will be. And it can include elements that make higher demands of the user's technology, because the target audience can be expected to have the modern software and hardware to cope with it. With Flash, Natalie can create videos and animations (and indeed create animations that combine video with computer generated images) and insert these directly into the advert; with this content, she can be confident of making enough of an impression on the audience to encourage a significant number to click through to the company's site.

More appealing content

In a very congested marketplace, giving online advertisements of all kinds a greater visual appeal can make the difference between success and failure. After all, online advertising brings different demands to more traditional media such as television and print - users will often spend a much shorter time looking at a webpage, so the window for catching a potential customer's attention is very restricted, and adverts need to make an immediate impact.

Ensuring that they have the most suitable content for their context can help create the largest possible impact, and Adobe Flash can help put that content in place. The same principles can be applied to any aspect of your company's online presence, from small elements of a page to adverts to entire sites. A short training course can help you get to grips with what Flash can do for your business, and before long, the world will understand better what your business can do for them.