The technology of this may be very cool, but it is intrusive as hell:
- Beginning [yesterday], more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, [ran] full-motion video commercials from Pepsi, AT&T, Honda, Vonage and Warner Brothers, in a six-week test that some analysts and online executives say could herald the start of a new era of Internet advertising.
"It's TV, without the television," said John Vail, director for digital media and marketing for Pepsi-Cola North America, a unit of PepsiCo.
....The new ad technology, from Unicast, an advertising company based in New York, invisibly loads the commercial while unwitting users read a Web page, then displays the ad across the entire browser area when users click to a new page. The resulting ad is identical to TV, whether the user has a high- or low-speed connection. The company says the technology evades pop-up blockers, but the person can skip the ad by clicking a box.
....Mr. Vail, of Pepsi, said he would monitor online viewers' reactions through a tracking study conducted by the research firm Dynamic Logic, to determine how much use Pepsi will make of such ads in the future. "Yes, it's intrusive," he said. "But I think customers will like it, because it will be so far superior to anything they've seen online."
James Nail, an analyst with the technology consulting firm Forrester Research, agreed. "This is the best full-motion, full-video TV ad technology that I've seen," he said. "I expect big demand from advertisers for this."
Among other features, Mr. Nail says he appreciates the fact that the ads do not slow Web surfing. The commercials load into a computer's temporary memory, and only when a page is idle. If a user clicks to a new page within the site before the ad is fully loaded, the process is merely paused until the browser is again idle. The ads run on Windows Media Player software, which an estimated 8 of 10 Internet users have on their computers.
Article comments
1 - jadester
"....The new ad technology, from Unicast, an advertising company based in New York, invisibly loads the commercial while unwitting users read a Web page, then displays the ad across the entire browser area when users click to a new page."
this bit, i suspect, is a load of bollocks, in that this kind of technology for standard internet ads (i.e. non-video, although animations have done it) has been around for at least a couple of years. I seriously doubt they've completely re-invented it, they'll just have tweaked something to do with the video to allow high-quality video to be played without too much slowdown. if they haven't even done that, then it's all just a lie, it's not new at all.
2 - Jim Carruthers
Obviously a whole bunch of people in advertising missed the Cluetrain again. It's bad enough that these morons are destroying email as a useful communication tool. I have one prediction, this will fail because there is a reason why people are turning to the internet and Tivo instead of watching teevee, they don't want to watch your stupid fucking commercials wrapped around insulting, worthless programmes you bunch of arseholes! Put teevee commercials on your web site and I guarantee people will stop going to your site.
However, I think Bill Hicks said it best when he said:
3 - TDavid
This kind of stuff will make RSS feeds even more attractive ;)
4 - jadester
that is classic Bill Hicks through and through. The whole audience laughed as well...
5 - Eric Olsen
The only problem is without advertising we would have to find a completely different model for television (we already have PBS, no room for more of that) and for the Internet. You don't want to pay for content? - and I sure as hell don't - then you need advertising. I just don't like the intrusive nature of this thing.
6 - Jim Carruthers
Teevee doesn't need advertising. Network broadcast teevee needs advertising, and the audience doesn't want it.
HBO doesn't have advertising during the programmes, BBC doesn't have advertising during the programmes, DVD's don't have advertising during the programmes. Tivo allows you to cut out the ads.
Putting teevee ads online is just negative conditioning, training the network to avoid those sites. Or make better advertising, however, the net is not teevee.
People are willing to pay for quality if it is made available.
7 - Eric Olsen
But there will always be a demand for free TV and advertising is the only way to pay for it, one way or another.
8 - Jim Carruthers
I agree, so keep the teevee advertising on the shrinking free Network broadcast teevee.
Bringing broadcast teevee advertising to the net is totally wrong. It's irrelvant, it is ignorant, and it won't work.
Advertising on the net needs to be relevant and serve my needs and demands. This is why Google Ad Words are about the only success in advertising on the web, in large part because it was developed by net people, not advertising people.
9 - Eric Olsen
I agree with all of that - I suppose you could have Google Adwords-type advertising that included video commercials, but you would have to choose to click on them - that's the real problem here: no choice.
10 - JR
The new ad technology, from Unicast, an advertising company based in New York, invisibly loads the commercial while unwitting users read a Web page, then displays the ad across the entire browser area when users click to a new page.
Fuck. That.
At some point I'm just going to give up the internet. I lived without it before, I can do so again.