• by Masha Geller , April 19, 2001

The saga of the big banner continues. Cynicism still reigns supreme, but some success stories are beginning to pop up.

Yesterday, teen network Snowball.com - one of the early adopters of the new units - released its first set of results. A word of caution if you happen to read these impressive stats elsewhere - like many dot-coms, Snowball is facing financial difficulty and the timing of this release is questionable at best. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the company laid off 33% of its staff and faces delisting from the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Nevertheless, based on a single campaign done for a female targeted over-the-counter health and beauty product, San Francisco-based Snowball.com found that the larger ads delivered a click volume of 18- to 36-times greater than with 468-by-60 banners.

The campaign incorporated three of the new-sized, IAB- supported units. With the Flash-enabled rectangular ads, Snowball says click activity was 25% greater than with a traditional banner ad. With the skyscraper unit, click- throughs were 18 times greater. And with the pop-up, it was 36 times greater.

Snowball.com said it plans to release additional findings - be they good or bad - from other campaigns in the future (if there is one).

The numbers are impressive, but I agree with Audio Graphics' Ken Dardis, who said, "Lets not get aroused. These ads are new. Folks are curiously clicking, like they did when banners were first introduced. The higher click-through rates for these larger ads aren't going to last."