• by August 17, 2000

With online merchants spending ever-increasing amounts of money to attract more page views and bring visitors to their sites, technologies that allow Web users to interact with sites without visiting them are becoming increasingly popular among online marketers.

This is a concept similar to Epod.com, a firm which has developed a twist on banners that are essentially sites within sites that don't take the user away from the site they're on.

Taking the above a step further, Bluestreak, a Newport, RI online marketing solutions provider, announced Monday a technology that connects rich media ads to back end databases, allowing collection of contact information, credit card numbers, and the like directly from ads rather than from a merchant's site.

"It's inherently difficult to grab people from other places on the Web," explains Richard Cleveland, VP of Marketing for Bluestreak. "This eliminates that problem by connecting to a site's database without having to be on the site."

According to Bluestreak, their technology can connect any Web database to any rich media ad such as a banner or email. Cleveland explains that an expanded space opens from the ad for gathering information, and that this information is sent securely to a site's database in real time.

The buzzword for the above is “transactional tunneling.”

The goal of transactional tunneling is to reduce customer acquisition costs and increase ROI. As Annette Tonti, president and CEO at Bluestreak explains, "our tunneling solution enables merchants to extend their site's capabilities across the Internet - they get eyeballs and interaction from people who never visited their site."

Currently, this tunneling technology can be served on over 10,000 sites, and most major ad networks accept it. It is designed to be used with technologies that help target ads to Web users, providing an additional way to increase advertising effectiveness. Bluestreak promises that media buyers and planners will find the solution easy to integrate because this technology does not require intensive programming and database integration, as is the case with past campaigns that tied databases with ads.

The first use of this technology is by LoungeLizard.com, a New York-based interactive ad agency, in an online ad campaign for ESPN The Magazine.

Belustreak’s technology is incorporated into a rich media ad designed to attract ESPN sports fans and features a pitcher hurling a baseball into home plate. Visitors can view the ad from the batter's perspective and expand the banner by clicking on the released baseball. Visitors then enter their mailing address information into the expanded page for three free trial issues of the magazine, and that information is then "tunneled" back to the ESPN site and registered as if it were done on-site. This campaign will continue through September and can be found on ESPN.com.

"We need an effective way to increase magazine subscriptions," said Jennifer