Beyond The Net
Move beyond banner ads
By Janine Warner
A lizard scurries across the screen at Lycos.com, an animated ad for the SUV hot on its trail. Two basketball players and a runner sprint through Sporting News.com, selling peanuts as they carry a flag across the home page. A spinning tire races around a page on AOL, directing viewers to Nascar.com.
Some of these ads are cute the first time you see them, but they take over your screen, making it impossible to do anything but watch them until the 10- to 20-second animated message is finished.
As an advertiser, you may like the idea of having a captive audience, but be aware that these kinds of aggressive advertising techniques are resulting in complaints.
What bothers me most about these aggressive ad models is they aren't even innovative; they are adaptations of the captive-audience model used in television and radio to reach broad audiences. People don't use the Internet because they want to be a captive audience. They use it because they want to actively seek things they're personally interested in.
One of the few new ad models that is taking advantage of what's unique about the Internet was started recently at The New York Times. The Times calls them surround sessions, and unless you're really paying attention, you may not even know you've been targeted with one.
The idea, said Stephen Newman, Assistant General Manager of NYTimes.com, is that an advertiser can ''own'' a reader's session, targeting a specific demographic population, and then dominating the ads a user sees while navigating through the site.
This may seem a little bit brotherish to some people, but surround sessions are designed to use less obtrusive ad space more strategically, instead of popping up randomly in the middle of every screen.
That means the ads you see on all of your pages are likely to be different from the ads that appear when your father or little sister or anyone else with a different demographic profile visits the same site.
What's distinct about surround sessions is that they take advantage of the marketing power of knowing something about a viewer and delivering a consistent message across multiple pages designed for that person. According to Newman, surround-session campaigns perform four times better than banner ads.
Another model that seems to be more effective -- and less annoying -- is the interactive cube or skyscraper started last year by CNET Networks and now used on many other websites. The theory behind these ads, which often appear as large boxes in the middle of a story or long ads down the side of a screen, is that visitors are more likely to get an advertiser's message if they don't have to leave a site to read it.
Banner ads don't work, several studies suggest, because readers visit a website with the goal of getting information on that site, not clicking on an ad to go somewhere else.
Although many of the cube and skyscraper ads at CNET are animated, they don't take over the screen or cover the words you are trying to read. Instead, these ads have links built into them that, when clicked, change the ad area so you get more information without leaving the site you are viewing.
As website owners struggle to find ways to guarantee the attention of consumers, online advertising is likely to get even more aggressive, but the success of surround sessions at The New York Times and interactive ads at CNET suggest there may be more effective ways to attract new customers than just screaming louder or running faster across a screen.
Smart online advertising means taking advantage of what websites know about their viewers, studying what visitors do, following them through a site, and using interactivity to enhance a message, rather than distract readers and hold them captive.
First publication, The Miami Herald, Mon, April 22, 2002