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| Interstitial Ads Fight For Attention |
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Online Trends January 2000 • Vol.8 Issue 1 |
Interstitial Ads Fight For Attention Companies Continue To Experiment With Advertising On The Web | ||
 For years, online advertisers have relied primarily on the banner ad—flashing banners, moving banners, banners with animated graphics—to get their message across. But the introduction of the interstitial ad, a move by the ad industry to increase brand recognition and direct sales, promises to make the future of Internet advertising infinitely more engaging. Amid the pages. Interstitial means something "in-between." The interstitial ad is just that; it inserts itself in your browser window or a pop-up screen while you're waiting for your next Web page to download. Many present a product or service with animated graphics, audio, and even video clips. New releases of the programs used to create these ads have improved their appearance with fluid video-like movement, high-quality sound, and all-around slick presentation. In fact, today's 15- to 30-second interstitials look more like a television commercial than a traditional online ad. And that similarity is no accident. According to Allie Shaw, vice president of marketing for the online advertising agency Unicast (http://www.unicast.com), today's interstitial ad is designed to bridge the gap between TV and the Internet for corporations and viewers alike. "The people who spend the most on traditional advertising (TV, radio, etc.)," Shaw says, "have yet to make their mark online." So, advertisers had to create an appealing Web-based ad that would convince executives to shift dollars away from traditional media and experiment with Internet advertising. But, Shaw says, the nature of the online audience also drives ad creation. What many interstitial advertisers try to concentrate on, she says, is reducing the intrusiveness from a total break in viewing the online information—something very important for the online audience member. A commercial that causes viewers to wait 10 seconds before playing, for example, would not just be intrusive; it would be disruptive. "It would be like watching two men paint a billboard," Shaw says. Eric Kavanagh, vice president of interstitial advertiser KMGI.com, agrees. He points out that unlike the passive TV audience, the online audience is in "active mode," looking up data, inputting information, etc. Online ads, therefore, must get the message to the viewer quickly and keep them involved with the experience. "Pop-up windows are not very popular," he says, because they block the view of a page and are annoying for users. KMGI.com's "Webmercial," introduced in early 1999, runs in a full-browser window and is targeted to information on the site to which a user is linking. Moreover, the ad minimizes any extension of download time for the intended Web page. After about 2 kilobytes (KB) of the 20KB to 30KB commercial is loaded, Kavanagh says, the Webmercial begins to play, and the computer and browser are free to continue with the intended task. Because many Web users are still operating on older computers, he adds, Webmercials are designed to operate efficiently on 486-model computers with 14.4 kilobytes per second (KBps) modem connections to the Internet. The ad's fluid movement comes from its vector-based design. This technology allows streaming video and instructions on how to construct the picture to download to a computer. So while the spot will run smoother on a faster computer, Kavanagh says, a modem's speed is not a factor for being able to view the ad. In addition, Unicast recently released its version of the modern, user-friendly interstitial, called a "Superstitial" ad. Traditional interstitial and pop-up ads, Shaw says, are "primitive in their delivery mechanisms and perceived by the user as intrusive. They take awhile to load and hold up the user's experience at the Web site." Superstitials work around this, she says, by loading completely in the background while you're viewing a page. The browser-window ad will only begin once you initiate a break in surfing, such as clicking a link on the page. And you can exit the ad at any time. Up to 70KB in size, Superstitials also work well on older computers, Shaw says, such as those with a 125 megahertz (MHz) processor and Windows 3.1. That's because the ad loads before it plays, she says. There's no streaming technology here, so the speed of the Internet connection doesn't matter. It's good to be rich. Behind every great Internet presentation is the technology driving it. For interstitials, the driving force is something called rich media. According to an eStats (http://www.estats.com) April 1999 eAdvertising Report, rich media encompasses animation, sound, interactivity, and/or e-commerce into a single presentation. Using programs, such as Java and Shockwave, rich media technology can be used for sprucing up banner ads, enabling 3-dimensional viewing, or allowing consumer "test drives" of various products. Kavanagh says that rich media allows faster page downloading, more dynamic imagery, and higher-quality sounds than is possible using the Web's main design language, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In addition, he says, rich media can run on any computer platform and is compliant with most of the current browsers. According to Shaw, rich media ads are stored on the server of the ad agency or Web site creator. Just as a TV network will send shows to the affiliate station, she explains, the server (network) sends the ad to the Web site (affiliate) for the viewer to see. Rich media technology allows us to create complex ads, she says. Often, the spots offer interactive games, video clips, and moving illustrations for viewers. And because of the increased consumer interaction, she says, "users are more inclined to watch those rich media ads." Interstitial roadblocks. Despite all the bells and whistles that rich media allows for interstitial advertising, some doubt the ads will ever catch on among a significant portion of online businesses. John Little is an MIT (http://www.mit.edu) professor who teaches courses in e-commerce and marketing. He says that these ads are too intrusive and, therefore, will not be a favorite advertising method on the Web. "Interstitials are substantially more in-your-face," he says. And preventing users—if only for a few seconds—from accessing a page could mean they won't return to that site in the future. Chris Anne Wheeler, vice president of information services at market researcher ActivMedia Inc. (http://www.activmedia.com), also cautions businesses against relying too much on the interstitial ad. "While advertisers may like the idea (of Web commercials), site visitors may not," she says. "They take time to load and prevent the viewer from getting to the site ASAP." Then there's the matter of cost. According to Wheeler, rich media ads are expensive, often costing thousands of dollars to produce—well above the tens or hundreds required for the average banner ad. For many companies, this puts the interstitial out of reach and makes the traditional banner more attractive. Commercial prospects. Overall, the jury still seems to be out on whether interstitial ads will be among those riding the online advertising wave of the future. Shaw, Kavanagh, and others point to positive studies, such as The Interstitial Advertising Intelligence Report from MarketAdviser (http://www.marketadvisor.com), that bolster claims of the interstitial's effectiveness. The 1999 report states, for example, that interstitials improved consumer ad recall two times better than banner ads. In addition, online users clicked interstitial ads an average of five times as much as they did with banner ads. However, the report also found that interstitials were twice as annoying for users as the traditional banners. Moreover, according to the eAdvertising Report from eStats, interstitials still make up an extremely small portion of all Internet advertising. According to that report, interstitial ads, which make up 3% of all Internet advertising today, will only grow to 6% by 2001. But corporate sponsorships of sites and online services are expected to bloom on the Web, rising from 40% today to 58% of all online advertising by 2001. Little and Wheeler both agree that sponsorships, not rich media interstitials, will increase dramatically across the Web in the coming months and years. Companies will continue to pay small commissions to Web-site owners who include a link to the business on their sites, Little says. Others will form "affiliate" networks, sharing cookie-generated information about users clicking onto the participating sites, and then targeting on-site advertising to the users' tastes and needs. A big advantage with this model of online advertising, Little says, is that "the cost per sale (for sponsorships) is a whole lot better than putting ads out there and driving people to your site." Wheeler agrees. "(Sponsorships) can do much for building brand awareness because they can be targeted to the right audience," she says, "and also offer the advertiser some degree of exclusivity." However, Shaw says the projected numbers from various market researchers for sponsorships seem a bit high. She predicts that new rich-media formats, including interstitials and video-based ads, will continue to grow and adopt more of the traditional TV-like formats. Consumer comfort with the Web is growing, she says, and people are getting used to accepting online advertising, much the same way that people accept commercials on television. Kavanagh says he also doubts sponsorships will grow as predicted. "There are only so many sites out there to sponsor, and you pretty much can only have one sponsor (per site)," he says. Besides, "no one remembers where they saw something," so how can a business collect good information on the sponsorship's effectiveness? The debate on the future of advertising on the Web is far from over. We can, however, be assured of at least one thing: There WILL be ads, all kinds of ads, on tomorrow's Internet. But if interstitials and the rich media technology driving it continue to play a part in online ad design, at least we may not mind so much that we're watching a commercial.  by Lori Robison
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