• by July 10, 2000

There is a consensus among online advertisers about banners - they're quickly approaching legacy format status. Various rich media formats, however, are just taking to the sky. Take the ever-annoying interstitials, or pop-up ads and their more-evolved cousin, the SUPERSTITIAL. Until recently, advertisers were hard-pressed to find websites capable of supporting these new technologies and potential benefits of using anything but the banner, but that's quickly changing.

Take today, for example. One of the leading online advertising networks, L90 has partnered with Unicast, the developer of the SUPERSTITIAL, to fully integrate the fancy pop-up its premium network of partner sites. This agreement bolsters L90's beyond-the-banner technology base while introducing the benefits of SUPERSTITIAL advertising to its advertisers and partner websites.

Benefits? These intrusive ad formats generate response rates a minimum of 6 times higher than banners (3.8% average CTRs), boast higher recall and post ad awareness, and allow for stronger branding experience.

The major difference between interstitials and SUPERSTITIALs is in how they're served. Regular interstitials are streamed into a browser and pop up as soon as a user opens a webpage - they may take a while to load and oftentimes slow down their host site.

SUPERSTITIALs are pre-cached instead of streaming - ads are downloaded into the browser cache while a user is viewing the page content. When the user is finished with the page and clicks to a new page, the SUPERSTITIAL pops up in a new window and plays from the browser cache.

Because the ads are fully loaded, this "polite" technology also guarantees ad impressions to advertisers.

By integrating SUPERSTITIALs on a network-wide level, L90 standardizes and simplifies the SUPERSTITIAL evaluation and deployment process for its clients by managing all sales, targeting, scheduling, delivery, interactivity reporting and billing surrounding SUPERSTITIAL campaigns for its website and advertiser clients.

There is a downside, however. Already, interstitials rank highest (15%) on the irritation factor (Grey/ASI study, 1998), so experts advise advertisers to make sure they buy sites that limit the number of inter- and SUPER-stitials they allow. Pop-ups in high quantities only annoy the users.