Only in the world of advertising is "intrusiveness" a good thing. Web banners aren't intrusive enough - you can scroll right past them, or ignore them at the bottom of a page. Even television ads aren't as intrusive today as they were before the advent of the remote control.
But Web commercials or "interstitials" - those flashy animations that play between Web pages, like the in-your-face-ads on the You Don't Know Jack game - may be the ultimate in positive intrusiveness, says the maker of Jack and the After Dark screensavers, Berkeley Systems.
Berkeley, which has no trouble commanding a sky-high US$70 cost-per-thousand-impressions (other Web sites get an average $30 per thousand; a prime-time TV show like Seinfeld gets between $20 and $30 per thousand), even commissioned a study to prove how intrusive the ads can be. The results were as loud and clear as Jack's obnoxious host.
Web commercials are more effective than television spots, print spreads, or traditional Web banners, reported Millward Brown Interactive, a research firm focused on online brand-building and advertising. The study was conducted in July on Berkeley's sites only.
"The reason interstitials score higher is that they combine the intrusiveness of TV with the involvement of Web banners and print," said Chris Deyo, general manager at Berkeley, which was snapped up by CUC International earlier this year. "When you're interacting with your computer, the experience draws you in. You're much more receptive to the message."
A recent report from Jupiter Communications, called "Beyond the Banner," is similarly bullish about the spread of this new mode of Web advertising and predicts that by 2001, interstitials will account for 25 percent of all online advertising revenue.
Despite such optimism, and Berkeley's profitable experience, Web commercials have yet to take root with many other sites. They have even lost some ground recently as interstitials pioneer Icon New Media, which runs the Word e-zine, abandoned the format.
The barriers to widespread adoption of Web commercials include technical snafus, user acceptance, bandwidth limitations, high development costs, premium pricing for interstitial placement, and a general lack of interest among advertisers.
Interstitials are off to a slow start. David Centner, CEO of New York-based K2 Design, hasn't heard clients clamoring for commercials, mostly due to the expense. "When it comes down to it, clients make decisions with their pocket books," Centner says, noting that development costs for interstitials are higher than animated banners. "They know that the more money they spend on development, the less they can spend on a media buy, and thus fewer people will see it."
Advertisers also seem to be more interested in the lead and sales-generation potential of traditional banners than the branding potential of Web commercials. Most commercials, like those sprinkled throughout Berkeley's online game shows, don't even allow users to click through to an advertiser's Web site.
"Interstitials are analogous to TV - it's a broadcast and a branding medium," said Jupiter analyst Evan Neufeld. "It's not about response as much as a traditional banner is."
Neufeld is also suspicious of any survey results - including those of MB Interactive - that try to gauge the effectiveness of Web commercials so early in the game. "[Interstitials] haven't been widely deployed enough to get a good sense of consumer response," he said. "There's still a novelty factor. There's a lot more audience response research that needs to be done."
For Word, which was one of the earliest practitioners of the interstitial concept when it launched in June 1995, the audience research has already been done, and the response was a resounding "nope." The site's commercials, which appeared as users jumped from the main page into one of the sub-sections, crashed too many computers. The full-on ads also bogged down users with slower Net connections.
"We were losing people left and right," said Tom Livaccari, vice president of new media at Icon. "We took them down in March to solve that problem and to make the site easier to navigate." Now, the site is experimenting with "Word TV," a simple series of animated GIFs that play in a frame in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen.
Livaccari also brought up the issue of consumer acceptance. While he defends his site's choice to experiment with commercials, he criticized a Honda ad currently running on the Weather Channel site. "It holds up the site for 15 to 20 seconds," Livaccari said. "Our delay was only five or 10 seconds." Neufeld at Jupiter and Deyo at Berkeley both cite America Online's use of interstitials as one that verges on the nuisance zone. "You have to say `no, no, no, I don't want to buy this' just to get to your email," said Deyo. "And that's a barrier and an obstacle."
But Deyo said that Berkeley doesn't field many complaints about its use of commercials, even though a typical game may include as many as nine ads of up to 12 seconds in length. He said that many players welcome the commercials as a chance to take a breather. Icon's Livaccari echoes that rationale. "Berkeley's use of interstitials is amazing. It fits. It gives you a chance to clear your head when you're waiting for the next round of questions." He and others say that while commercials may fit within an entertainment context, they tend to be frustrating to users in news and information contexts, like the Weather Channel.
And while Deyo contends that Web commercials give ad agencies much more creative freedom than do banners, this still isn't prime-time TV. For Berkeley's games, the commercials are built in Macromedia's Director then compressed down to a file size no larger than 75 Kbytes. "You're still very limited to what you can do," said Jupiter's Neufeld. "They're 15 seconds long, using limited animation. It's more like a CD-ROM than TV."
Despite the drawbacks, commercials are alluring to content sites - maybe more so than to advertisers. They're a new source of ad inventory, and one that can be sold at a premium price. "There are only so many pages and banners and impressions available," observes Randy Hall, an account exec at Boston agency Holland Mark Martin Edmund, "and interstitials create new inventory. It's as if a radio or TV station had access to another five minutes an hour to sell."
While Word used interstitials as a way to add value for advertisers, and didn't sell them explicitly, Berkeley offers ad packages that include one interstitial and one banner per game. For a flight of 100,000 games, with two ad impressions per game (one interstitial and one banner), advertisers pay $14,000. That's a $70 cost-per-thousand, much higher than traditional banner ads. But Deyo defended the price. "It's like the cost of a one-inch, one-column classified ad versus a one-page full-color ad. Do you think those should be the same price?"
That's a question for the advertisers, and while they may be saying "yes" to Berkeley's Jack and the soon-to-be-launched Acrophobia, they're proving skeptical in just about every other context. "Advertisers tell you they want to move beyond the banner," said Neufeld, "but when publishers tell them what it costs, they decide they're happy with the banner."
