All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
MSNBC is introducing technology that will allow advertisers to take over your whole screen long enough to look like TV. Full-window, animated ads that download automatically and run for several seconds will soon punctuate navigation through its site, just like a commercial break.
"Personally, I think it would be intolerable, but people put up with TV commercials and some will surely take it," said Jason Catlett, CEO of Junkbusters Corp., makers of filters that screen out banner ads. "With blocking software they at least have a choice," he added, although he didn't know if the full-screen ads will be susceptible to the filter.
A two-week trial of the new advertising format will begin later this month on MSNBC, with one unidentified advertiser. Kodak was the first to experiment with the new breed of flashy Web commercials - sometimes called interstitials - in January on the MSN Mungo Park site.
Others, like Addicted to Noise are experimenting with full-screen ads that link between content areas. Currently, Addicted to Noise runs a Gap ad in the link connecting The Question (of the day) to its answer. "In two years when there is streaming video, I'm sure we'll see a full-screen 30-second ad, just like TV," said David Hyman, Addicted's vice president of sales.
Whether the fiercely contentious Web community will easily swallow these more aggressive format remains to be seen. "You don't want to offend people," Michele Madansky, associate of interactive business development at BBDO told Wired News. "But I don't think advertisers have a problem with intrusive advertising."
Word, put up full-screen ads back in 1995. These ads - which look like an inert banner on a solid background - appear for 10 seconds when visitors move between sections of the site. Tom Livaccari, vice president of Icon, which owns Word, said: "We never got any backlash from users when we started, so we just kept them up."
Microsoft has begun working with advertisers to develop its 5- to 10-second Web commercials, using Macromedia's Flash technology (previously called Future Splash and made by FutureWave). "The goal here is to have the ad load immediately and run smoothly using a 14.4 K [modem]," said Steve Goldberg, group manager for Microsoft's advertising business unit.
Flash's vector graphics technology allows advertisers to shrink the size of a file and therefore decrease the time it takes for an ad to download to a visitor's browser. The single, tiny file can then scale to any size without any degradation in the quality of the graphics. The ads developed by MSNBC are compressed into the 10 KB to 15 KB standard file size for banners, downloaded in a one-by-one pixel image in the background of the page the user is currently viewing, and, as the viewer clicks away, expand to fill the screen for several seconds. Viewers need a Shockwave Flash plug-in, available on the Macromedia site, or an ActiveX control.
Advertising rates for the new format of Web commercials will be set well above the CPM for banner ads, potentially creating an impressive new revenue stream for MSNBC and others that follow suit. Initially, however, the ads will be lumped into packages including banner and section sponsorships, said Scott Moore, director of business development for MSNBC.
Microsoft now has the lead in developing Web commercials, but Goldberg says the software giant is not interested in retaining a long-term proprietary advantage. "We sincerely hope that this kind of animation will become standard and that as agencies learn how to do it, more advertising dollars will go into media and not production."
