Online ads get more aggressive, evolving into commercials using sound, motion, color

08/24/99

By Doug Bedell / The Dallas Morning News

In his 1970 best-seller on advertising theory, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front-Line Dispatches from the Advertising War , Jerry Della Femina warns that careers on Madison Avenue could fade quickly.

"Never forget how to get back to Brooklyn," he counsels would-be ad executives.

For those attempting to mold the emerging World Wide Web into a successful ad-driven medium, that advice may still ring true.

Evidence continues to grow that Internet surfers roundly ignore those leaping, blinking banner ads sprinkled through content. Some studies show that as few as half of 1 percent of consumers click through for more information.

But Madison Avenue isn't about to go home.

Traditional retail powerhouses such as Macy's are only now beginning to pour money and American ingenuity into Net marketing. As ad agencies search frantically for effectiveness, they are increasingly drawn to a handful of innovative tools designed to grab our eyeballs.

The most promising of these are described as "rich media" or "javamercials." Filled with slick sound effects and splashy, moving graphics, they mimic television spots in appearance and impact.

One breed, called superstitial by its developers at the Unicast online ad firm, loads quietly into a browser's cache (storage area), then explodes in a pop-up window even after users leave the Web site where they found the advertisement.

Recent advertising studies show some of these techniques are far more effective than the traditional banners. But their mere presence is enough to draw fire from those who would keep the Internet a pure space for information and communication.

A javamercial poll on ZDTV's Web site (www.zdtv.com) recently drew a 510-134 negative reaction from visitors to the mere concept of auto-loading ads.

"Web advertisers are constantly wishing the World Wide Web were just like TV," says Jason Catlett, president and founder of Junkbusters (www.junkbusters.org), which fights junk e-mail and provides help with programs to strip ad content from view. "But this is the Internet. If people don't like that pop-up window, they can get rid of it."

Concept developer Allie Shaw of the Unicast online ad agency says her peers are sensitive to those feelings.

"It's kind of their child," Ms. Shaw says. On the other hand, companies justify the expense of e-commerce sites with the sales inspired by online ads and promotions.

And much of the bellyaching seems to diminish when Web surfers encounter these newfangled, interactive intruders.

"In reality, even older users are very accepting of these ads, and studies show the newcomers to the Internet are even more accepting," Ms. Shaw says. "I think the masses truly expect to see advertising like this. They understand it's necessary to support presentation of content."

Around Mother's Day this year, visitors who brought their browsers to the Macy's Web site (www.macys.com) were secretly loaded with a Unicast superstitial.

A mouse movement or attempt to leave the Web site suddenly induced a pop-up, baby blue window filling half the screen. Inside, touching images of a mother and child rose up, then faded. Type gently faded in and out. "Mother's Day is May 9th," it read. "Not sure what to get your mom? ... (next screen) Hmmm ... (next screen) How 'bout a.) Something for the house. b.) Something to wear."

The pop-up was, in Web advertising terms, "sticky." It came to the fore of all windows on the visiting surfer's screen. And it stayed until the user clicked it off or followed the interactive links leading to pictures of gift suggestions and their prices.

Ms. Shaw says that this technique provoked a 19 percent click-through rate to the 12 areas it promoted. And, she says, similar results are being experienced with such clients as Women.com, Hewlett-Packard, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Mentadent and First USA, among others.

Unique qualities make these ads particularly attractive to Web marketing firms. Superstitials can be loaded quietly in the background and never play until fully downloaded. Although they may tie up some computer resources, superstitials are designed to load in 60 seconds or less and apparently don't slow down other browsing activities.

Superstitial strikes

Superstitials may be up to 70 kilobytes in size at dimensions ranging from postage stamp to full screen. They can be triggered by a user action such as a mouse movement or mouse click. And when they come to life, there's no waiting for images to load. Users can be bombarded instantly with sight, sound, theme music - just about anything an advertiser wants.

"It's more intrusive than a banner, and intentionally so," says Ms. Shaw. "It's a drive-by. It's an immediate impression."

Wary of offended visitors, Unicast builds in some safeguards. Every ad contains a line with instructions on how to quickly kill it. And limits are placed on the background programming to keep people from getting stuck with the pop-up exploding over and over because of their movements within a site.

"It really is important as we begin to bring this into the market," says Ms. Shaw. "Everyone wants to protect relationships with the user. They want better content to make the relationship even stronger. You don't want to drive people off."

Other strong entrants into the rich media race include IBM, which commissioned OgilvyInteractive to produce a stunning, small pop-up (www.ogilvy.com/o_interactive/ what_flash.asp). A vivid black-and-white presentation opens with a moving piano keyboard that begs surfers to click on it. Doing so produces pleasant chords.

But after a few clicks, the keyboard disappears. A flurry of fast-moving text zips into view, and the thumping IBM theme song bursts from the visitor's speakers as text rips through a testimonial to the company's e-commerce prowess.

For companies such as Ms. Shaw's Unicast, these designs offer hope. "Web advertising superstitials put the control of the creative product back into the advertiser's hand," she says.

A recent Jupiter research study predicted that online advertising will grow to $11.5 billion in 2003, surpassing dollars spent in some traditional media.

The Jupiter research, presented to members of the Jupiter Online Advertising Forum, shows that online ad spending will increase 40 percent over the next four years, with financial services, automotive and media ventures leading the way.

The race for that cash has already taken some strange turns. In July, the San Francisco-based Scient, a Web start-up that helps companies develop sophisticated e-commerce operations, took out a $100,000 full page ad in The Wall Street Journal. On mostly white space, it read, "This is not our ad."

The spare text pointed readers to a URL for the "real ad," a multimedia presentation at www.ad.scient.com that presented testimonials from satisfied clients while a soundtrack ebbed and flowed with the muffled buzz of a crowd.

"We're trying different things," says Sarah DeMore, Scient's director of marketing. "We kind of raised the bar for ourselves with that. And companies are responding. E-mercials are going to be the coming thing in the next couple years."

For Mr. Catlett and others who frown on intrusive ads, such statements fly in the face of reality.

"The Web didn't come out of a commercial basis," says Mr. Catlett. "It came out of intellectual and academic pursuits. It doesn't want the top-down model of television, where the broadcaster controls what you see. I think that's pretty obvious from what we've seen in reaction thus far."

Power of new tools

The rich media efforts would not have been possible without new Web page production tools being offered by Macromedia.

Most of the superstitial ads and stunning graphic work on the Internet today use one of that company's products.

Its Flash, Director and Shockwave programs are skyrocketing in popularity because they produce fast-loading, dynamic images and high-quality sound for any computer platform.

Macromedia Flash and Shockwave Player downloads reached record levels, with 48 million downloads recorded during the last quarter. A new study by NPD, the parent company of Media Metrix, shows that more than 83 percent of the Web population can now view Flash content, up from 77 percent four months ago.

Flash, a program that is only 3 years old, is giving advertising agencies the zippy tools they want in their rich media efforts. And browser companies have encouraged the movement by bundling more Macromedia products into the top browsers, Internet Explorer and Netscape's Navigator.

What used to require a download, in other words, is now incorporated into most browsers for free.

In a May report by independent research firm Forrester, analyst Eric Schmitt predicts "companies gunning for better site performance will turn to Flash en masse."

Two years from now, Mr. Schmitt predicts, "more than 95 percent of Web surfers will be able to view Flash, and fully half of top-tier e-commerce sites will use the technology."

As a result, companies as wide ranging as Disney.com and Novell have adopted Flash and other Macromedia products to spiff up their Web presence (see www.macromedia.com/software/ flash/gallery/collection/).

Developers are even working on Flash applications that will perform on PalmPilots and other small-screen Internet devices.

"A more TV-like experience is definitely coming," says Macromedia's Eric Wittman.

Whether consumers will widely accept that trend remains to be seen.

Says Mr. Catlett: "Advertisers want an immersive experience with sound and color and movement.

"Unfortunately, users don't want to be immersed."

Send e-mail for staff writer Doug Bedell to dbedell@dallasnews.com.