• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, April 6, 2006

In a first for the NYTimes.com, the Web site Wednesday at noon ran an ad consisting of a live Webcast within a banner. The ad, an infomercial for Cisco Systems, featured Ron Ricci, vice president, corporate positioning at Cisco Systems, Inc., speaking to the audience for 15 minutes, and then answering visitors' questions for about 11 minutes.

While Cisco did a similar Webcast several months ago in the United Kingdom on the Financial Times' U.K. site, and also last year in France, Germany, and Italy, Wednesday's streaming infomercial marked the first time the company had utilized a live-stream-within-banner format in the United States.

Ricci touted Cisco's network as a platform for innovation--and used the ad format as "a prime example of the network driving new forms of user interaction," said Sue McCarthy, partner, group planning director at Neo@Ogilvy, which arranged for the ad to run on NYTimes.com.

The live format also was unusual because most online video today is available on-demand instead of a TV-style timetable. Even when Web sites stream live events, they often keep the clips on the site for on-demand viewing later. McCarthy said Cisco hadn't yet decided whether to make the clip available for streaming on demand.

Alyson Racer, vice president of sales for NYTimes.com, acknowledged that the real-time format was unconventional--"traditionally, the Web's not known for appointment viewing," she said--but added that a live, interactive Webcast, complete with questions and answers, was perceived as a strategy for capturing the audience's attention.

The Times on Saturday began promoting the Webcast, running a total of around 1.3 million impressions telling visitors about the event. Visitors were invited to enter their e-mail or cell phone numbers to receive reminders about the Webcast. Banner ads promoting the event ran on the business, technology, and international sections of the Web site.

Tech company Flashtalking, based in London, powered the Webcast-in-banner.