• by Shankar Gupta , July 28, 2005

Rich media ad company EyeWonder recently began marketing two new online formats: click-for-full-screen video ads; and moving ads that allow full-screen video to be resized and repositioned while playing, resulting in ads that shake, tilt, or flip.

EyeWonder Director of Marketing Jason Scheidt said the advantage of the moving ads, dubbed "Movers and Shakers," is that they're more eye-catching than regular video ads. "The first step of the video ad is obviously to engage the viewer," he said. "If you're on a page and you see a video bouncing around a little bit or tilting or shaking, it's going to attract your eye."

Consumers sometimes find hyperactive ads irritating, however, and Scheidt said that EyeWonder has not done any focus group research with potential ad viewers to determine whether the Movers and Shakers fall into that category. EyeWonder clears its ad formats with its publisher site partners, and Scheidt said that they wouldn't include anything that would annoy. "We've got to work within site constraints, and they're not going to feature an ad unit that'll scare off their users," he said. "All of our sites seem to have no problem with it so far."

The new format also includes a click-for-full-screen format, which EyeWonder competitors KlipMart and Eyeblaster already offer. According to Scheidt, EyeWonder was waiting to perfect a new feature, based on bandwidth auto detection, which will detect any users with slower connections and not offer them the full-screen video option. "If it detects a narrowband connection, it's smart enough not even to display the click for full-screen button," he said. "It'll recognize the 10-15 percent who are on 56k or less, and it won't even show that option to them."