• by Ken Liebeskind , December 17, 2001

After New York Times Digital introduced surround session advertising last week, a few other companies announced they're doing it, too. The announcements prompt speculation about the future of surround sessions. Will they become the next big online advertising vehicle and if so who will be selling them?

Until about a week ago, there was only one widely-known place to buy surround session campaigns – the New York Times Digital - a publisher, offering surround sessions to its own clients. Now there are a number of alternatives. One is Click2Net - a former cost per click ad network turned ad server – is now offering surround sessions to publishers.

"We're a third party ad server, like DART or RealMedia," says Jeff Lancaster, Click2Net's director of sales and marketing. The company introduced surround sessions at the @d:tech show recently and has begun signing up clients. One of them is eMarketer, an Internet advertising research firm that sells online business reports and has a website with more than 50,000 subscribers. The company will offer surround sessions to the advertisers on its site, like New York Times Digital does.

When asked if business-to-business advertisers were good prospects for surround sessions, Crystal Gurin, ad sales director for eMarketer, said, "Any advertiser looking to get a series of messages in front of potential qualified customers can do it. It's getting a lot done in one session instead of seeing one ad at a time. It really qualifies a customer."

eMarketer hasn't begun to sell surround sessions yet, but has signed up with Click2Net, meaning it can start at any time.

When asked what had to be done to enable publishers to run surround session campaigns, Lancaster said the company's TrueImpact software allows them to run any kind of campaign with out any special set-up.

DoubleClick is in the game, too, serving surround session ads for Verizon on New York Times Digital. The Times has its own ad server, which it used for AstraZeneca, its first surround session advertiser. "We can serve them internally or a client can use a third party server like DoubleClick," says Heather Keltz, director of advertising operations at New York Times Digital. A third party server might be preferred for its ad tracking reports, she says.

While DoubleClick may be serving surround session advertising, it isn't selling it yet. But it may in the future. Jeffrey Silverman, DoubleClick’s vice president/general manager, distinguishes the company's DART platform, which serves ads, from its media division, which sells advertising. The media division hasn't begun selling surround sessions, but Silverman says it is evaluating them now. "We'll see how they develop over the next three to six months. We want to see if the demand is real and may offer them as another targeting tool," he says.

The other company saying it's offering surround sessions is VIPcast, a rich media ad server (MediaPost/Dec. 14), which claims to have invented session billing, but its claims are hard to verify since it won't name the advertisers or publishers for the three session billing campaigns it claims to have served. But the company is noteworthy for its efforts in using session billing for rich media campaigns, as opposed to the static advertising used on New York Times Digital surround session campaigns thus far.

The future of surrounds sessions will be dependent on companies like Click2Net and VIPcast, which can offer them to publishers. Whether more companies offer them depends on the success of the initial surround session campaigns. Rudy Grahn, a Jupiter MediaMetrix analyst, calls session billing the "flavor of the month," the latest trendy ad vehicle that hasn't proven itself yet. "It's only as good as it costs," he says, claiming it must be measured to determine whether it works. Surround sessions promise a specific audience for the ads, but "how much it costs to get the audience and could the money be better spent elsewhere is the essential question that has to be answered," he says.

As for ad networks offering it, Grahn is slightly skeptical, saying that networks have huge numbers of visitors but they aren't a specific audience so it will be difficult for an advertiser to target its message across a network of sites. New York Times Digital is "a fantastic environment, a strong audience with brand loyalty," he says. But the same can't be said for ad networks or other sites that might consider surround sessions, he says.