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| Bigger Ad Units Propel Renewed Banner Push |
| By Sarah J. Heim
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| February 19, 2001
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Although the banner ad bandwagon has been on rocky terrain over the past year, some viable alternatives have recently emerged. First San Francisco-based CNET announced four new, larger and more interactive ad units. Then young adult Web network Snowball.com and portal iWon.com said they are also bringing new ad offerings to the interactive arena.
"I haven't seen anything catch on as quickly as this, the new CNET ad units, for a long time," said Jim Nail, senior researcher at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. "There's more excitement now about online advertising than I've seen in 18 months."
While Nail is cautiously skeptical about the latest buzz, he acknowledged that there is a new economic imperative among Web sites to "service customers rather than ride the merry-go-round and grab as many brass rings as possible."
Similarly, Snowball.com president Rick Boyce, who's been working in online advertising since 1994, said that while the old economic imperative for Internet sites was to get big quickly, the new imperative is to get advertisers and make a profit.
To this end, San Francisco-based Snowball.com will roll out four new ad units over the next few months. Beginning last week, Boyce embarked on a "Going Beyond the Banner" road show, to promote these new units to traditional advertising agencies.
"It's important to get agency creative departments excited about our interactive ads," Boyce said. "As a community, we haven't given them much to work with in the past."
Snowball.com's new units include enhanced interstitials, a newly enlarged skyscraper, a pop-up window that randomly places itself on the page and a messaging-plus unit with added interactivity similar to the recently introduced CNET ads.
Snowball.com will also eliminate much of the clutter on its predominantly content-oriented pages, Boyce said. All ads will be available in Flash, enhanced HTML or standard GIF format.
Jonas Steinman, founder and co-CEO of iWon.com, agreed that the new recipe for online ad success means creating engaging, interactive and targeted ads that don't annoy users and give ample time for marketers to get their messages across. iWon is based in Irvington, N.Y.
"We're not relying on the 468-by-60 banner anymore," added Evan Sternschein, iWon executive vp of sales. Like Snowball.com, iWon.com will be offering an enlarged, Flash enabled "Jumbo" ad, Unicast Superstitial commercials and the "iWon Click" unit that allows users to order samples, and get coupons and discounts without leaving the site. Advertisers include Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, eBay, Gomez, Gateway and Toyota.
"This medium has under-delivered in the past," Boyce said. "I think we're all going in the right direction now."
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