• by January 4, 2001

By Ken Liebeskind

With all the abuse banner advertising is taking, you'd think Web publishers and Internet service providers would be developing a wealth of new formats. Well, slowly but surely they are.

The holdup is largely due to the ad standards that were created four years ago, which made the banner the industry norm. "There was an attempt to standardize the platform for advertising on the Net to come up with a pixel size that advertisers and marketers could use to compare the effectiveness of the ads, because they run the same units everywhere," says Barry Briggs, president of CNET Networks Media.

But the standards "don't allow for innovation," he admits, "so there is a need to enhance the messaging we enable advertisers to deploy."

Another problem is that most Web publishers "devote space to their own branding," Briggs says, which makes it hard for advertising messages to stand out. "Users come to the site for a reason and want a certain kind of information. Let's make sure we're giving it to them while allowing advertisers to tell their story in a way that doesn't interrupt the user experience."

To that end, a format other than banners is preferable because banners take users away from a site to another page.

The solution for CNET is a redesign, launched Jan. 15, with a new ad format called Messaging Plus. The unit is standalone advertising that doesn't require users to click through to another page. Instead, it appears in a multilayered tab format that provides advertisers with room to tell the full story. Briggs calls it a 3" x 4" rectangular unit with four tabs that allows advertisers "to go deeper into telling a story." You click on the tabs to get different messages, with individual tabs providing product and contact information and more.

The ads drop into news stories, so they are ideal for a content site like CNET. They are also ideal for the advertisers who at CNET are usually high tech companies with "a complicated product to offer," Briggs says. The format allows advertisers to describe the products in detail and provide users with the information they need to facilitate a purchase.

Sun Microsystems and Oracle are the first companies testing the new format, Briggs says. The advertising will be offered at a cpm price "in the $75 arena," he says, calling it a fairly low rate. Charter packages will be offered. Briggs also says CNET will sell the unit to others and make it available for industry wide use.

CNET has developed two other new ad sizes in addition to Messaging Plus: the Tower, a vertically shaped ad and the Leaderboard, a larger sized banner that may or may not be clicked through. All of the new sizes are being launched in January.

CNET is representative of the news and other content rich publishing sites that are offering new formats in an effort "to differentiate themselves from other online advertisers and command more dollars," says Joe Kyriakoza, global account director at B