NEW YORK The Web has long relegated advertising to the sidelines as part of a do-not-interrupt mandate that separated cyberspace venues from traditional media. That’s slowly changing.
 
A group of top-tier publishers, including The Wall Street Journal and Reuters, has signed up to test a new initiative that plops commercials in front of users as they arrive at Web sites, blocking the content. They will have the option to close the ads after 10 seconds. The spots then retreat into traditional banner placements. The video placements are designed to appear when users arrive at sites through links on social networking sites or via search engines. For content sites, that means access to high-priced video ads even when their content is text.
 
The move to get more interruptive follows on the heels of the Online Publishers Association rolling out big new ad units that will take up large chunks of on-screen real estate. What’s more, publishers have taken to other interruptive ad tactics, like units that autoplay video with sound and, of course, pre-roll spots before video content.
 
“This is going to be a natural evolution where those user-interruptive quotients are going a lot higher,” said David Payne, CEO of ShortTail Media, which created the video ad unit it’s calling Digital 30 to run across its network of top-tier sites. “Display on its own can’t support the content creation and delivery.”
 
ShortTail is running the ads over the next four weeks across sites like Weather.com and Entertainment Weekly’s EW.com. New York digital shop Special Ops signed up for the test for an entertainment client that it declines to name.
 
“It theoretically makes a lot of sense,” said Jason Klein, co-CEO of Special Ops. “It’s a similar type of user-interruption experience as a commercial in the middle of a TV show.”
 
The moves are necessary because the ad system on the Web, as it is currently structured, does not work for content sites. Outside of high-touch integrations, those sites have seen the vast majority of their inventory thrown in the remnant bin where it is picked apart by ad networks for pennies. 
 
Instead, publishers need to think more like TV networks than newspaper publishers, which relegate advertising to the sidelines of the content, Payne argues. While video ads have proliferated with video content, it needs to find a home on the 90 percent of pages that aren’t video, according to Payne.
 
“Our biggest challenge is we haven’t been able to agree on new types of advertising that’s valued by brand marketers,” he said.
 
The D30 could create a middle level of advertising for publishers outside of traditional display advertising, which brands do not believe is worth that much for their goals, according to Payne.
 
The company will test different implementations, experimenting, for example, to determine whether to limit the spots to one per user per site or one per user across the ShortTail network.
 
“What we’re saying is if you want to move share over from TV, which is still the biggest ad marketplace, you better look like TV more than a newspaper,” said Payne. 

- Brian Morrissey

NEW YORK The Web has a problem: It’s largely ad supported, but the rapid-fire way people churn through page views by the dozens makes it less than ideal for brand advertisers.
 
Yes, the move to make the Web safe for marketers is progressing on many fronts. There’s the development of new, larger ad units by major publishers and an increased focus on creativity within the industry, not to mention there’s an increasing number of people consuming online video. But because brands, above all else, need face time to make their case to consumers, more must be done to get ads in front of users, 

Two ad networks, VideoEgg and Meebo, have recently introduced so-called persistent ad formats. Unlike typical banner ads that users can zoom by when scrolling down the page or going on to the next, these units stay on the screen, occupying a border at the top or bottom. Both companies have data that suggest the basic principles of TV work online: show an ad to someone long enough and it will likely sink in. 

Currently, impressions on the Internet are plentiful and cheap. Each time a user switches pages, a new ad call is made. The result is publishers want visitors to view as many pages as possible, which triggers more of the ad calls that pay sites’ bills. For the user, it means increased time spent navigating. For the advertiser, it means users barely notice the ads.

“The larger issue is the Internet isn’t really designed for brand advertising,” said Troy Young, CMO at VideoEgg, an ad network that has pioneered cost-per-engagement pricing for rich media ads. “We’re going to see the medium evolve to make way for better advertising.”

One effort along those lines is an ad product from VideoEgg. The persistent ad format, called Twig, is a thin banner ad occupying the bottom or top of the screen, no matter where the user goes on the page. Hovering on the banner expands it into a full-screen ad with video and other graphical elements. VideoEgg, which is paid by advertisers only when users expand ads, created the unit after seeing that user response rates are closely tied to how long an ad stays in front of them.

“Time on the page is a key driver of performance,” said Young. “We know that from our data.”

Meebo, a popular Internet messaging service, is running a message bar on the bottom of the screens of sites. The bars allow users to easily activate chats with friends from the site and share items on the page. They also, of course, include advertising. Toyota and AT&T are among the first advertisers to use the unit.

Martin Green, COO at Meebo, said data the company has compiled indicates that a persistent placement is key to making advertising work in social environments because users need to be exposed to ads for at least 30 seconds. Its tests have found that time with an ad represents fully half of the likelihood a user will interact with an ad, equaling the combined effect of factors like creative, targeting and format types.

“That blows me away,” Green said. “You’re dealing on the Internet with a different kind of attention. I think the Web is about divided attention. You need to separate the page delivery from the ad delivery.”

Another ad network, Lotame, is making time spent with an ad a cornerstone of its efforts for brands. The impression model treats all impressions equally, whether they are in a neglected corner of a page or only briefly visible to users, said Andy Monfried, CEO of Lotame. To remedy this, Lotame guarantees the amount of time it will place an ad in front of a user.

At a time when advertisers want evidence their ads are working, that can give advertisers some measure, outside of the display ad click rate that hovers around zero, that their messages are getting through.

“You better come up with a metric that accounts what those 99.9 percent are doing when they see your ad,” Monfried said. 

NEW YORK The advertising world is all atwitter about Twitter. A majority of the public at large, by contrast, hasn’t even gotten sufficiently interested in Twitter to have a disparaging opinion about it. These contrasting views emerge from a dual-audience LinkedIn Research Network/Harris Pollconducted last month. 

People who have a professional involvement in the advertising decision-making process, whether at ad agencies or client companies, were asked to choose among three ways of describing Twitter (or, as a fourth option, saying they “don’t know enough about Twitter to have an opinion”). Among these ad people, 45 percent agreed that “Twitter is something that is just in its infancy, and its use will grow exponentially over the next few years.” On the other end of the opinion spectrum, 17 percent said “Twitter is already over and it’s time to find the next best thing.” In the middle were 21 percent saying “Twitter is something that mostly young people and the media will use, but it will not move more into the mainstream.” Seventeen percent didn’t have an opinion.

The pattern of response was wholly different when the same question was put to the general public. Among these respondents, just 12 percent said they view Twitter as something that will soon “grow exponentially,” matching the number who regard it as mainly something the media and young folks will use. Just 8 percent adhered to the “Twitter is already over” school of thought. But an outright majority — 69 percent — said they don’t know enough about Twitter to have an opinion about its future. (The total exceeds 100 percent due to rounding.) In its way, that’s more damning than if they said Twitter’s day is done. Even among those in the 18-34 age bracket, 55 percent said they didn’t know enough about Twitter to have an opinion about its prospects.

Given the disparity in opinion between ad people and the general public on Twitter’s likely course, it was surprising to see a congruence on the question of whether Twitter is effective when it comes “to promoting products and ideas.” (One caveat, though: This question was asked just of respondents who had expressed an opinion about Twitter in responding to the prior question, which means it excluded a majority of the general public.) Eight percent of the ad people and the same percentage of the general public rated it “very effective” for this purpose. Fifty percent of ad people and 42 percent of the public at large rated it “somewhat effective,” while 24 percent of the former and 31 percent of the latter called it “not that effective.” Eight percent of ad people, vs. 19 percent of the general public, called Twitter “not at all effective” when it comes to promoting products and ideas.

 

NEW YORK Just a few years ago, people who had any professional involvement with online ad campaigns were an exotic breed. Now, according to a LinkedIn Research Network/Harris Poll, those who use the Internet as an ad medium outnumber those who use TV or radio. However, as advertising shifts online, consumers don’t necessarily welcome it.

A segment of the polling last month was conducted among people with a professional involvement in the decision-making process about ad campaigns, whether at agencies or client companies. One question asked, “Do you typically incorporate the following types of advertising in your media campaign(s),” with a menu of choices that included Internet, print, radio, TV and cell-phone advertising. The biggest vote went to Internet advertising, with 92 percent of respondents saying they typically use it. Print was close behind, at 88 percent, while radio (46 percent), TV (46 percent) and cell-phone advertising (39 percent) lagged well behind.

If print’s strong number in response to that question suggests that the medium isn’t in such bad shape after all, just wait. A follow-up question asked the ad professionals to say whether they’re using each medium more often, less often or as often as they did a year ago. Predictably, the Internet had a strong “more often” vote, at 74 percent, as did advertising via cell phones (69 percent). But while 10 percent of respondents said they’re using print advertising more often, 49 percent said they’re using it less often. Actually, the responses weren’t much cheerier for the old broadcast media: 38 percent said they’re using TV less often, vs. 14 percent saying they use it more often; 43 percent said they’re using radio less often, vs. 11 percent saying they use it more often.

Marketing professionals’ enthusiasm for online advertising is not altogether shared by consumers. So we gather, at any rate, from a segment of the poll that asked respondents among the general public to offer opinions on how “frustrating” they find various aspects of Internet advertising. Rated as “very frustrating” by 80 percent of these respondents were “Ads that expand on the page and cover the content that you are trying to read.” Nearly as many had the same adverse opinion of “ads where you can’t find the skip/close button” (79 percent) and “ads that automatically pop up” (76 percent). Smaller majorities applied the “very frustrating” label to “ads that automatically open if you mouse over them” (66 percent), “animated ads playing automatically, with or without sound that distracts you” (60 percent) and “ads that play music/have loud soundtracks” (60 percent).

Although the rise of Internet advertising has plainly taken revenue away from old media, ad people don’t regard it as an either/or proposition. Fourteen percent of the poll’s ad professionals said they use their Internet advertising solely “as a stand-alone digital campaign,” but many more (54 percent) said they use it “in an integrated campaign with other media.” Thirty-three percent said they “use both equally.”

While partisans of Internet advertising speak of its ability to prompt immediate action on the part of consumers, that’s not the function most cited by the poll’s ad people when asked to say how they “typically” use their advertising in this medium. Seventy-nine percent said they use such advertising “as a branding device,” easily topping the numbers who said they typically use it “to drive information gathering for an offline transaction” (65 percent) or “to drive online transactions” (58 percent). Fifty-seven percent said they typically use it “to promote community around your brand, e.g., message boards, memberships, fan clubs.”

There was relatively little variation from one region to another in the proportion of ad people saying their campaigns include the Internet and print. But there were significant disparities when it comes to broadcast advertising. While 56 percent of respondents in the South said they use TV, just 39 percent in the West said so, as well as 44 percent in the East and 43 percent in the Midwest. There was a similar pattern with respect to radio advertising: 57 percent in the South said they use it, vs. 46 percent in the Midwest, 41 percent in the East and 39 percent in the West.