Spongecell was a startup company that I worked for in 2007-2008. One of their business ideas was interactive advertisements. But there was a problem: The vast majority of display advertisements are created in Flash, and no one at Spongecell was familiar with Flash.

Over a period of about 2 months, I learned how to use the Flash IDE, I learned how to code Actionscript 3. I produced a series of prototypes, and conducted usability interviews with potential users to determine how they should be modified.

These ads were quite sophisticated. Spongecell's 'Promote' product was designed to allow users to market their events by sending email blasts, SMSes, adding a badge to their Facebook profiles, and so forth.

The Flash ads used our API to put this functionality inside of display ads that could be distributed across the internet. One possible scenario would be: A user views an ad for a Jeans sale occuring in the next week, and, within the ad itself, they click to invite a friend to attend the sale with them. Or send an SMS. Or any of approximately 10 actions.

A technical complication was that ad servers only accept files of up to a maximum size of approximately 50 kilobytes normally - quite low by the standards of Flash applications. So the ad was developed with a central 'loader' module which contained the static image background of the ad. When the 'loader' module was opened by the browser, it requested ancillary modules which contained the screens allowing for the functionality of the ad.

Once the prototypes had evolved to a certain point, I, together with another of Spongecell's coders, transformed the prototypes into a more reusable, extensible, optimized format.

An entire gallery of Ads created from this work is available on the Spongecell Ad gallery page.