• by June 13, 2002

StreamingAds Beginning to Burble by Ken Liebeskind, MediaPost Staff Writer Advertising associated with streaming web content is starting to surface. In the past, Yahoo.com was virtually the only site that ran it, but now there are many more players in the game, although it’s still relatively new.

The advertising often fronts streaming content that is selected by users. As the content they request loads, an ad plays, usually fifteen seconds long. This is the main instream avail, although there are other opportunities, especially from Yahoo.

On24.com, a financial-news network that distributes content to over 300 portals and sites, including Yahoo, CNET, and Nasdaq, began offering instream advertising in Q1. Its two clients are TheStreet.com and Genuity. The ads are “mini TV spots” that run a maximum of 15 seconds, according to senior director of adverting Scott Philips.

Ifilm.com, which plays short films and runs film-related content such as reviews and summaries, delivers 15-second ads while users are waiting to see a film. It started offering instreams late last year, and has run them for Mitsubishi, Absolut, HBO, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and Altoids, according to senior vice president of sales Don Meek.

Since it’s a film site, film companies are major advertisers and Meek says consumer entertainment brands will get the most value out of it. The first 30 campaigns produced a 6-to-10-percent click-through rate, he adds. Besides offering instream avails, On24.com and Ifilm.com offer advertisers the opportunity to target them through DoubleClick’s DART technology.

Yahoo offers instream advertising at different areas of its site, including the Finance channel and Yahoo Broadcast. The Financ> annel, which plays continuous news from 9 to 5 weekdays, is broadcast on a tripane player, with video content in the upper left, related text in the upper right, and a browser below. Full-length TV spots run in the video area with related text in the upper right with links to sponsor sites.

BMW, Infiniti, Ford, MyDiscountBroker, and Cadillac have run instreams on Yahoo. 360i.com, an Atlanta agency, prepared an instream for Onecore, reformulating an existing TV spot and running it on Yahoo Broadcast.

iTVPortals Developing Ad Models by David Cotriss, Contributing Writer In the iTV market, TV portals (referred to here last month as “walled gardens”) control access to content on a main screen through partnership and advertising deals. They function like the AOL model, but in this case a remote control is used to navigate between interactive program guides (IPGs), video on demand, the web, email, local information, and television commerce (t-commerce).

While few true “TV portals” exist today, several cable operators are beginning rollouts, and advertisers should take note. Companies such as Insight Communications and Digeo are making inroads. Insight’s solution, for instance, focuses largely on local movie and dining information and offers local advertising opportunities. Some other players include MetaTV, Agency.com, and TV Guide Interactive.

Research from Gemstar-TV Guide shows that up to 30 percent of the screen can be devoted to advertising without offending viewers, reinforcing an important concept from the standard web. As long as the portals are kept easy to use and without excess ad clutter, industry experts believe they will provide valuable advertising opportunities in the near future. Such advertising could add value to regular spot buys, and performance-based pricing will likely develop. Perhaps most importantly, user behavior c?Îe tracked and accounted for.

Among other new iTV advertising opportunities, RespondTV announced partnerships with a premier list of iTV developers to extend the availability of enhanced broadcasts, virtual channels, and other iTV applications, which in turn creates more advertising opportunities. Partner companies have developed and aired successful campaigns for leading programmers and advertisers and include Agency.com, Cylo, and PushyBroad. The deal essentially expands RespondTV’s stable of creative talent and serves as a catalyst to increase the number of interactive campaigns on-air. Respond TV also announced a new virtual channel in conjunction with House of Blues that will provide iTV users with consistent live music information, 24 hours/day. This provides a new iTV advertising venue for appropriate advertisers.

EmailThere Oughta Be a Law? by Susan Breslow Sardone, Contributing Writer “The Internet is changing our lives, largely for the better. But as consumers, we should have the power to stop getting junk email on our computers or on the computers of our children,” says Congresswoman Heather Wilson (D-New Mexico). Wilson is the sponsor of H.R. 718, the Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act of 2001, introduced earlier this year. It’s one of several bills designed to introduce a set of rules to regulate the commercial email industry. A popular issue with legislators (a similar version passed last year, with only one dissenting vote), Wilson’s bill has bipartisan support.

In this session, H.R. 718 has already passed the House Commerce Committee. The House Judiciary Committee marked up its own version in May, making changes to be reconciled in the House Rules Committee. While there is no deadline, Wilson and supporters are hopeful it will be brought to the House floor for a vote prior to the July 4 recess.

The bill proposes “It shall be unlawful for any person to initiate the transmission of a commercial electronic mail message…unless such message contains a valid electronic mail address, conspicuously displayed, to which a recipient may send a reply to the initiator to indicate a desire not to receive any further messages.” Additionally, it calls for “identification that the message is an unsolicited commercial electronic mail message.” Violators could face a fine of $500 per incident, not to exceed a total of $50,000.

“The problem with spam is that the receiver pays for email advertisements,” Wilson maintains. “Junk email is like ‘postage due’ marketing or telemarketers calling collect. This bill will give parents and consumers the power to say enough is enough and close their inbox to annoying and obscene junk email.”

Ben Isaacson, executive director of the Association for Interactive Media, which represents some 500 technology companies (many of them email marketers), sees the issue somewhat differently. Although he supports anti-fraud measures in the bill, “We feel any labeling violates First Amendment rights.”

Isaacson is also concerned that because legislators don’t fully understand email marketing, the bill “could have a deleterious effect on third-party permission emailers.” For example, an intermediary service company that merely sends and stores email addresses could be held liable for not complying to an opt-out request in a timely fashion.

A proponent of industry self-regulation, Isaacson adds, “We have a number of business guidelines being developed and a consumer initiative campaign to explain how recipients can stop spam themselves.” In the meantime, he encourages email marketers to lobby on their own behalf by contacting Congress members to explain what they do and how this bill would affect them.

WirelessA Few Steps Forward... by Adam Bernard, MediaPost Staff Writer The Wireless Advertising Association (WAA) plans to announce new draft standards for mobile and wireless advertising. The WAA’s Ad Standards initiative recently created select subcommittees to research and develop standards in four platform/protocol areas: WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), SMS (Short Message System), and Voice/Audio Portals. The WAA will be meeting on June 26th, in San Francisco, and the agenda includes presentations from committee leaders.

Other news comes from California, as Los Angeles Times Interactive released two wireless applications that distribute content and classifieds to web-enabled phones, pocket PCs, and pagers. The technology was provided by AdaptiveInfo Inc. and allows for LATimes.com and Recycler.com (which is another property of Los Angeles Times Interactive) to deliver personalized content or classifieds. Since personalized content is delivered over time, the order of how content appears is based on how the user selects stories. Basically, if a person reads the sports first everyday, the technology will know this and put the sports first, not world news. This personalization service also works with Recycler.com’s classified listings: If someone keeps looking for 8-track tapes, the user will get classifieds relevant to music first.

In other news, Nokia and Borland have teamed up to make the J2ME platform available for Java-enabled mobile phones. The collaboration is intended to advance the market for wireless application development on Java-capable mobile devices through both companies’ technologies. Nokia is hoping to debut Java-enabled phones this year, and to have them in the mass market sometime in 2002.

A bit of news that’s potentially of concern is that according to a report by the META group, people are dropping the wireless web like a hot potato. META found that 90-95 percent of corporate users of WAP-enabled cell phones leave them as “enabled,” and choose not to use the feature. This might not be completely fair, however, as walking into your local cell phone store results in seeing quite a lot of cell phones that are WAP enabled, and some people may purchase them and simply wait until the technology gets better.

Starting in October, 911 will be able to pinpoint the location of callers, under FCC rules. The idea that cell phone users can be located is something that has advertisers salivating. Marketers see a huge potential. They have dreams of sending targeted coupons to people as they’re walking past a store or shopping area. This would have to be regulated in some way, though.

Groups, including the AT&T Wireless Group, are currently developing “opt-in” technology to try to deal with this potential invasion of privacy. This would allow marketers to do what they want only to customers who give consent. This is something that quite a few wireless marketers have talked about, since they don’t want their advertising efforts to go unnoticed or, even worse, resented.