Unicast, the creators of the SUPERSTITIAL, have just redesigned their website, so I thought it might be appropriate to talk about all those things that pop up on your screen and are rumored to be some of the best ways to capture someone's attention online. Interstitials is a blanket term for pop up ads and up until a few months ago you'd be hard pressed to find a wide-enough array of sites that supported Interstitials. However, as more sites and ad networks are accepting various interstitial formats, it's important to differentiate between the many types of these lively creatures. …

Ignoring several companies who disputed their self-proclaimed dominance of the online advertising world, Engage today announced internal research findings that demonstrate their "continuing ability to help advertisers achieve higher click- through rates and conversion rates through proven optimization methodology." The announcement claims that all of the advertisers who participated in the study achieved click-through rates of "more than double the industry average of 0.4%." Two points of contention: First, the 0.4% comes from a February 2000 Jupiter report, which has raised some eyebrows since most advertisers would peg average click-throughs at around 0.2%, and falling. Second, Engage …

Search engines are a mess. Site designers bend over backwards to include every possible keyword to score preferred placement while users have to wade through thousands of entries. Nevertheless, a huge percentage of web users do turn to search engines to find your dot-com clients and maybe search engines should be included in your media plan. Pay for search engine placement, you ask? Well, bid for it, actually. Whether or not the following concept will survive the test of dot-com time remains to be seen, but a recently- launched search engine, Win4Win, is hoping to make it by having websites …

AdKnowledge today released its Q2 Online Advertising Report (OAR), where the lead finding measures the time lag from a click on a web ad to a sale or registration on a site. The report indicates that 60% of customers who convert (buy or register) on a site after clicking on an ad do so within the first half hour after clicking. Additionally, 30% converted within the next 7 days. AdKnowledge also found that click rate performance is directly affected by location of placement types. Not surprisingly, portal keyword placements generated higher click rates than other ad placement …

With great fanfare, interactive media buying service Global Network Incorporated yesterday announced the release of its "first" white paper dealing with website trafficking. Aside from GNI's obviously over-hyped prediction of Internet ad revenues reaching 27% of total ad expenditures by 2007, the 21-page paper is a yet another document calling for web advertising standardization. For example, the paper suggests that the variations of impression rates can be minimized to less than 10% if publishers, auditors, ad servers, and advertisers agree on setting standards. What a novel idea! The paper also suggests that a study be conducted to …

Could it be? Could the principles used by traditional advertisers for decades also apply to online media? With all this talk about technology that prevents users from seeing the same online ad twice, we seem to have forgotten about one of the basics of advertising in general - frequency. New-York-based advertising research firm Dynamic Logic (DL) - http://www.dynamiclogic.com - has launched a brand new monthly newsletter, in the first issue of which the company states that when it comes to online ads there is a direct correlation between the branding value of online advertising and the frequency of …

The final results of the online advertising campaign case study initially presented at @d:Tech San Francisco in May, are finally available online, as was announced earlier today by AdKnowledge and Internet Profiles Corp. (I/PRO). The study covered a two-week, four banner, five million impression online advertising campaign for the non-profit organization, Ad Council's Connect For Kids, that ran on the Lycos Network and showed that branding provided significant impact to the advertiser, with 10-32% of registered visitors having taken action after seeing the ad, but not clicking on the ad. Designed to show how an online ad campaign …

Yesterday's Engage announcement about being "the first company to extend advertising technology across multiple media platforms" certainly ruffled some feathers. But that's almost expected anytime someone publicly calls themselves "the first" or "the leader" in anything. The announcement claimed Engage's new technology would allow advertisers to target and serve ads to wireless devices, streaming media, enhanced TV and other web-enabled vehicles. Intriguing? Absolutely. But are they really the first? For example, Advertising.com said Engage's claim was "totally inaccurate." And rightly so, because Advertising.com has been offering their ad-serving technology (AdServe) that delivers ads across Internet-enabled devices for almost …

Out-of-home and online advertising may be closer to realizing the convergence dream than any other media. After Snapple announced last week that they will be wrapping ATMs, some of which already serve ads to bank customers, with Snapple ads, some thought "what will they think of next?" We didn't have to wait long for an answer. One of the first things to hit the newswire this morning was a press release from CMGI's AdForce network - http://www.adforce.com - announcing their alliance with Hypercom to deliver targeted ads to consumers as they pay for groceries. As consumers swipe their …

This morning, ChannelSeven ran a story about the importance of maintaining well-assembled and current company press kits online. The same goes for media kits, as I'm sure you'll agree. How many times have you tried to locate a site's media kit online only to give up after an hour of searching through the pages, pick up the phone and spend the next two days playing phone tag with a rep? And when you finally do get the media kit, it's usually tons of hype and little info. This is especially true of ad networks - some will claim to …