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e-commerce
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By
SUSAN STELLIN
New York Times
Like it
or not, Web browsing is about to be interrupted by a few commercial
messages.
This goes against the strongly held conviction among Internet
users that information and services should be free and encumbered
by advertising only discreetly - if at all. Floundering dot-coms
built on the hope of advertising revenue, however, are hoping
users will change their minds.
Until recently, most Internet advertisements have been relegated
to the margins of Web pages - and easy to overlook. What advertisers
want, these dot-coms have been painfully learning, are catchy,
riveting and compelling advertisements; in other words, impossible
to ignore.
After all, in other media, some analysts say, advertisements
are routinely placed in the midst of programming, and for
the most part consumers have come to accept the interruption.
"Rudely interrupted? Hey, we do that with radio, we do that
with any serially served medium," said Michael Tchong, the
editor of Iconocast, an industry newsletter. "It's accepted
in other media because they grew up with it."
Like it or not, many in the industry think that it is inevitable
to sustain the businesses that rely on advertising.
"All this free content isn't going to continue to be free
unless users pay for it somehow, and the payment is advertising,"
Tchong said.
Newer types of Internet advertisements are emerging, including
those that appear in applications other than on a Web browser
- like e-mail, wireless devices or multimedia players. There
are advertisements that remain within the browser but appear
in a window that overlays or replaces the one the user was
viewing.
While there are many names that describe advertisements in
the latter category, the three most common types are pop-ups,
which are small windows that appear on top of the browser;
interstitials, which are full Web pages that download and
appear within the browser as a user is moving from one page
to another; and superstitials, a type of interstitial developed
by a company called Unicast that downloads in a less obtrusive
manner.
For all these advertisements, the point is to capture the
viewer's attention more effectively than the banners that
are usually found on a page's margins.
While many sites have long used pop-up windows to promote
their own services - America Online, for example, uses pop-ups
to inform members about new features - only recently have
several sites used them for advertisements. The Microsoft
Network has consistently used pop-ups for surveys and Microsoft
promotions; now it is testing them with advertisers.
"MSNBC has been using pop-ups to give consumers the option
to customize their news by ZIP code," said Mike Siegenthaler,
the marketing manager for MSN sales. "The test this quarter
is going to dictate how we move forward with pop-up advertisements."
Part of the reason for the tentative nature of the strategy
is that consumers are generally loath to have their browsing
interrupted.
Both pop-ups and interstitials appear on a screen without
warning and, depending on the advertisement's file size and
the computer's connection speed, they can delay an impatient
surfer by 30 seconds or more as the advertisement downloads
and cycles through an animation.
To minimize this wait, Unicast, in San Francisco, has developed
the superstitial, which it describes as a "polite load." While
a user reads one Web page and the Internet connection is idle,
an advertisement downloads in the background. When the user
clicks on a link to go to another page, the animated advertisement
plays up to 20 seconds while the other page loads. Unicast
requires advertisers to include a link that allows viewers
to close the superstitial window at any point, an option of
many interstitials and pop-ups.
Unicast licenses its technology to Web publishers and advertising
networks for a fee of $5 for each thousand advertisements
that run. Publishers and advertising networks then sell the
opportunity to advertisers for $35 to $90 for a thousand advertisements.
Allie Shaw, Unicast's vice president of global marketing,
said 350 Web sites and advertising networks had licensed the
technology, including AltaVista, Excite, ESPN and DoubleClick,
and more than 50 companies were running superstitial campaigns.
While these alternative advertising formats are gaining momentum,
they represent a small portion of the advertising market.
Research conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers showed that interstitials
(including pop-ups) represented just 3 percent of Internet
advertising revenue in the second quarter.
Superstitials were counted in the study's so-called rich media
category (advertisements that contain audio, animation and
video), representing 2 percent of advertising revenue that
quarter.
But most industry watchers expect those numbers to grow. These
types of advertisements give advertisers the opportunity to
design bigger, more compelling ads.
In a superstitial for Taco Bell that ran last summer, for
example, several sheep were shown jumping over a Taco Bell
sign. With the sound of crickets chirping in the background,
one sheep slammed against the sign with a thud.
According to Shaw of Unicast, more than 12 percent of the
viewers who saw the sheep advertisement clicked on it - much
higher than the industry average of less than 1 percent for
standard banner advertisements. On average, Shaw said, click-through
rates for superstitials are about 6 percent.
Chris Bolte, a vice president for national sales for AltaVista,
which has run pop-ups, interstitials and superstitials on
its network, said the company was experimenting with several
alternatives to standard advertising banners. The key to making
messages compelling, he said, is focusing them on the right
audience.
For instance, AltaVista, a majority-owned operating company
of CMGI Inc., ran a pro bono superstitial for Rockthevote.org
on its entertainment channel in early November. The goal of
the nonpartisan campaign was to persuade 18- to 24-year-olds
to vote; toward this end, the animation featured stark photographs
- of an electric chair or a child holding a gun for example.
They were overlaid by "yes" and "no" check boxes. Users who
rolled their mouse over the "yes" box saw a message presenting
one side of the issue, the "no" box another. At the end of
the animation, viewers could link to sites where they could
register to vote or request an absentee ballot.
The click-through rate on AltaVista for that campaign, Bolte
said, was more than 16 percent, adding that click-through
rates for superstitials for automotive companies and movie
studios have been 15 percent to 20 percent. "It's becoming
more of an accepted format both for advertisers and users,"
Bolte said.
That may be the case. But as the industry experiments with
advertising formats, advertisers and publishers are aware
that they need to be sensitive about how far they can go before
alienating Web users.
"The advertising community obviously sees a lot of value in
this medium" and is trying to achieve a greater impact, said
Peter Petrusky, the director of new media at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
But with some of these new ad formats, he said, "There's a
level of intrusiveness that advertisers and publishers are
going to have to manage." |
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