• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 19, 2004

In a move that could dramatically accelerate the migration of TV advertising to the Internet, Unicast Tuesday will unveil a new format that is capable of rendering conventional 30-second TV spots online with hardly any of the excruciatingly long download times or bandwidth required of streaming video formats. The announcement will include plans by major marketers such as AT&T, Honda, McDonald's, Pepsi, Vonage and Warner Bros. to participate in a six-week, "pre-paid beta" launch of Unicast's new so-called "Video Commercial" on a wide range of ad-supported sites.

Site participating in the test include such major publishers as ABCNews.com, About.com, Accuweather, CBS Sportsline, Emode, ESPN, FoxSports, Gamespot, iVillage, Lycos, Maxim, Morningstar, MSN, Tribune Properties, and UGO.

If the test proves successful, it could be a boon to the burgeoning online video advertising marketplace, and could encourage many top marketers to finally take online seriously as a major advertising medium. It was such a rationale that Starcom MediaVest Group and its Starcom IP unit used last fall when it embarked on its so-called "broadband embrace," in which it struck a slew of upfront deals for advertising on major online organizations offering broadband video, including Feedroom.com, MSN and Yahoo! Platinum. In fact, Starcom's move, and the millions of dollars in marketing budgets behind it, actually got several of the organizations to accelerate their own broadband video plans, including MSN.

But Unicast's new Video Commercial will go those streaming video ads one better, providing marketers and users a seamless advertising experience that requires no download time, with none of the herky-jerky motion normally associated with online video.

The Unicast spots accomplish this via a patented technology that allows the 2 megabyte video ad files to pre-load into cache without a user being aware of it and then launching at the exact time the user and the publisher choose. As such, Unicast's new Video Commercials will become the closest thing yet in terms of replicating a TV commercial advertising experience. Of course, they will go conventional TV ads one better. They will be interactive.

If successful, the new ad format could also prove a saving grace for Unicast, which so far has failed to breakthrough in a meaningful way with its primary rich media advertising format, the so-called Superstitial, despite an extraordinary amount of promotion.