IQ News: Cool Tool - Banner Daze

New ad vehicle fights the banner ad clickthrough dilemma. Some companies stand immobilized over the current state of online advertising. Others scratch their heads over the weak performance of the oft-ignored banner ad. Still others sweat and strategize over the next big thing in the interactive ad arena. For San Francisco-based Organic, it's none of the above. Realizing that the pervasive problem of ineffective online advertising can't be solved in a day, the interactive agency's New York office has developed an interim solution. Called the expand-o, the new ad vehicle allows an advertiser to include some of its Web site's content in an expandable banner ad. At the click of a mouse, the advertisement expands to as much as five or six times its original size. Although the company acknowledges the need to find a long-term solution to the online advertising dilemma, they are focused on identifying a present-day fix. "We're firmly rooted in the here and now," said Stephen Tortorici, creative director at Organic. "We want to apply common sense to what we're doing. Eventually bandwidth won't be a problem, but now it is." Rather than reinventing the wheel to create the expand-o, Organic leveraged existing DHTML technology to re-create a portion of the advertiser's Web site within the body of the ad. "It's very simple. We didn't invent it. The site serves through the shell we create," said Tortorici. Since the ads basically reach into the site and pull out content, reformatting it where necessary to fit into the expand-o space, the ad can do anything that exists on the site itself, including transacting and registering. For instance, an expand-o for Fort Washington, Pa.-based CDnow provides consumers with a sample of dynamically updated content housed on the music retailer's site. When the consumer clicks an arrow on the ad, it expands to show the top 10 songs in CDnow's Top 100 Billboard Chart. Similar to the expand-o, another ad vehicle called the ePod, developed by a New York-based e-commerce company by the same name, provides a transactional advertising showcase that contains a merchant's branded message and targeted products. Likened to a mini-store or a Web site within a Web site, an ePod seeks to pique Web surfers' curiosity in the advertised product or service and lets them shop, sign up for newsletters or register for prizes all within the ePod, without whisking them away from the site they are on. Unlike the expand-o, the e-commerce-enabled ePod resides on a site in its full size. Both models, however, address the major flaw found in affiliate programs--losing visitors via the banner ad clickthrough. Contrary to traditional banners that "hijack" the consumer away, the expand-o ad keeps the user on the site, negating the weighty decisions swirling around since the dawn of the Internet. "It eliminates the questions of should I stay, should I go, should I click, should I not click," reports Serge Del Grosso, media director for Organic. "The consumer can interact with the ad without leaving the site." In addition to CDnow, Organic has created expand-o ads for clients such as Madison, Wis.-based online original art e-tailer Guild.com and an undisclosed B2B company, which appear on sites like USA Today. The expand-o creates a win-win situation for the advertisers and publishers, says Tortorici. If someone visits a news site to scan the latest headlines, for instance, they can interact with an advertisement without leaving the site, which builds brand recognition for the advertisers and site stickiness for the publishers. "Consumers are more interested in the window-shopping model. It's actionable and it exports an experience," reports Tortorici. n

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IQ News: Cool Tool - Banner Daze

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Ann M. Mack