Internet ads becoming more insistent
Leslie Walker The Washington Post
Saturday, October 12, 2002WASHINGTON Maybe the owl flying out of Yahoo Inc.'s home page got to you - the one carrying an oversize scroll inviting you to visit Harry Potter's Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Perhaps the Elvis ghost dancing around the Lycos network got on your nerves, or maybe the musical Doritos salsa ad playing automatically on Microsoft Corp.'s MSN portal sent you over the edge.
But get used to it. Web advertising is getting ruder and noisier by the week. That is because the Internet ad industry is in turmoil, still struggling after eight years to establish standards for what advertising should be. Web publishers continue their hunt for the Internet's version of TV commercials, and now the show is about to get even more boisterous.
Over the past few months, the leading Internet portals - MSN, Yahoo and America Online - have loosened restrictions on how much audio, video and animation they allow advertisers to display. That is encouraging advertisers to experiment with even more interruptive formats, including video, talking characters, floating logos and animation.
"The hope is we can turn this into an effective advertising medium, which it is not yet," said Robert Rice, chief executive of Viewpoint Corp., a technology vendor that AOL chose to help deliver three-dimensional graphics and "rich media" advertising to its subscribers. "We are still in the early days of deep experimentation."
But traditional media buyers remain resistant to Internet advertising in almost any form, which is a key reason Web ad revenue has been in steady decline since dot-com companies, which were heavy advertisers, started dying. Nielsen Media Research estimates that Internet ad revenue during the first six months of this year was down 8.4 percent from a year earlier.
The one exception amid the gloom is companies that provide software for producing ads in rich-media formats.
"We've seen 1,000 percent growth in our ad revenue in the last 12 months," said John Vincent, chief executive of Eyewonder Inc., a small Illinois-based company that has licensed its ad technology for use at more than 1,000 Web sites.
Eyewonder specializes in adapting TV ads for viewing online, using software that has a built-in media player so video ads can play without requiring downloads. That means people do not need a media player from Microsoft or RealNetworks Inc. installed on their computers to view them.
An Eyewonder spot that Unilever has been running for its Lynx cologne on a British Web site illustrates what Vincent sees as the potential of Internet advertising. Aimed at young men, the short video shows women in sexually suggestive poses juxtaposed against brief scenes involving a worm, a frog and an old man in bed. The mystery and sex appeal entice men to hit the replay button, Vincent said.
"That ad never ran on TV and won't ever run on TV," he said. "The Internet allows you to communicate more precisely to a demographic you want to reach without having to worry about Susie, who is 6 years old, seeing it. You can appeal to John, who is 22 and goes to clubs, with more creative license."
The promise remains elusive, though, because even if there were agreement over which Web commercials work best, technical standards are still missing. An ad agency can send the same video to all the broadcast TV networks, and it will look the same on the air each time. But Web videos typically cannot play on multiple sites, because each site differs in the software used and in rules governing how ads should be displayed.
The result is costly for advertisers, which must reformat ads if they want to run the same Web video on various sites.
One vendor, Unicast Communications Corp., responded last month by establishing standards for the advertising software it provides to 1,000 publishers. But the company's standards apply only to its formats, and even those are not entirely in line with standards released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
Unicast is also trying to popularize names for the weird new Internet advertising. It recently proposed calling the various formats "in-page," "over-page" and "in-between page," depending on how they appear on screens.
An in-page ad, for example, is where the video or other imagery stays in one spot, such as inside a horizontal banner or a large vertical box known as a skyscraper. Over-page ads use imagery that seems to sit on top of the page being viewed, often floating or moving from one spot to another. In-between ads are a proprietary format that Unicast devised, called "Superstitials," that load behind the page being viewed and appear in a large window when you move to a new page.
The most obtrusive of the lot are "takeover" ads: They seize the page you're trying to read, freezing it until the Web commercial finishes playing. Takeover ads rarely have "click to close" buttons, making them even worse than pop-up ads.
Grüße Max
