• by Masha Geller , March 7, 2002

A few months ago at the @dTech show, when eMarketer’s Geoff Ramsey showed an ad covering up almost all of CNNfn’s homepage, people in the audience chuckled. Even though Geoff was talking about bigger banners achieving better results, a full-page ad was not something online ad execs were too enthusiastic about.

Lack of enthusiasm doesn’t seem to have prevented the development of technology that makes really huge ads possible, though. For an example, check out the AllPosters.com ad on this new section of ugo.com. It takes up almost half of the entire page, breaking up UGO’s content in two sections.

UGO calls these things Vendor Integrated Pages (VIPs) and says that in addition to AllPosters.com, DeBeers has run some units as well.

The technology that makes this possible is called an I-Frame and it’s making some waves in the advertising industry because it makes our jobs considerably easier on two fronts. The first is, because the ad is actually the AllPosters.com’s homepage, counting impressions is an easy task. The second advantage is creative substitutions – you can change the creative by simply changing the content of the page the I-Frame links to and it’s effective immediately.

The downsides are considerable as well: I-Frames don’t work on Macintosh computers and most email programs don’t know how to deal with them yet. However, both of those problems are likely to be solved in the near future.

I personally think these ads are way too big and thus don’t have much of a future. What do you think?