• by Bill McCloskey , June 13, 2002

Fasten your seat belts: Experimentation is back in vogue. Fearing they may not survive the great web shake-out of 2001, publishers are starting to experiment like crazy in order to see what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to online advertising.

What a change from a year ago! In the old days, the big fear for publishers was losing and alienating their audience—advertisers be damned. Anything that smacked of intrusiveness was verboten. We used to call it the “Yahoo! Playground Syndrome”: the Yahoo sales staff had a directive from on high that stated that Yahoo!“is not a playground for advertisers and technology vendors.” Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Publishers are now waking up to the hard fact that they have been alienating the wrong group all this time: the folks who actually pay them—the advertisers. So, the pendulum swings back the other way. CNET and CBS Marketwatch have started launching “big units”: large interactive Flash spots smack dab in the middle of the page’s content. The IAB has gotten on the bandwagon with new—and larger— advertising unit standards (although no mention of Flash).

For some, even this is not enough. Being restricted to any size box is much too confining. In today’s world, you can forget about being above the fold. Now you can be above the page with ads that spill out all over the content you’re reading.

That is the idea behind surprisingly similar technologies being offered by three new companies: Eyeblaster, United Virtualities, and Ad4ever. Each uses transparent DHTML layers combined with Flash to create ads that quite literally pop off the page and hover over editorial content. Promoting a new car? Why not let it drive right across the page and beep at you?

So, how much intrusion is too much? And, are these technologies really working? Laura Metrovich of the Yankee Group calls these types of technologies “flies on the screen of the online picnic” and warns consumers will become frustrated “trying to swat them away.” Case studies show that these newer, more intrusive technologies, because of their novelty, have a “halo” effect; click-through’s are high—10 percent, even 25 percent in some cases. But so far, there is nothing that proves that these overly intrusive technologies have any effect on conversion rates. I’ve been a rich media evangelist for over ten years now, long before the term rich media came along, so it might seem strange when I say this, but…maybe it’s time we stop experimenting for a while. Maybe we need to take a breather to get the technologies that we know work to work better.

Things like Flash, for instance, which needs to be better integrated into ad serving technology, tracked better, and easier to deploy. Things like Streaming Media, which needs to be better understood and cheaper to develop. Things like Java, which needs to be easier to measure by third party auditors. Right now, more than novelty and intrusiveness, we need a baseline rich media standard to start building from. Rich media ad creation, deployment, and reporting needs to become child’s play. The playground has been empty for far too long.

Emerging Interest founder and CEO Bill McCloskey can be reached at bill@emerginginterest.com.