Banner ads get super-charged

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By Terry Lefton

(IDG) -- Visa is no stranger to online advertising. While many big marketers have stayed on the sidelines, the credit card giant has been advertising on the Web since 1995 and experimenting with animation and other sorts of "rich media" ads since 1997.

So when the Interactive Advertising Bureau issued standards for seven new, larger ad formats last February, it wasn't surprising that Visa was already using them. The IAB established the formats as voluntary guidelines, although Visa -- taken seriously because it spends hundreds of millions of dollars on media every year -- was already far along, and web sites such as ESPN, CNet and New York Times Digital also were using variations on the ads.

The ad formats sound like a bewildering, jargon-ish nightmare, but they've become common parlance in the Internet ad world by now. The new formats include: "skyscrapers" at 20 by 600 pixels and 160 by 600 pixels; "large rectangles" at 180 by 150, 300 by 250, 336 by 280, and 240 by 400; and the 250 by 250 pop-ups.

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During the 2000 holiday season, Visa used a supersized Flash-enhanced ad showing a gift unwrapping itself. Viewers who clicked on it were directed to shopping sites that had partnered with the credit card company. As the Super Bowl approached, another ad -- part of Visaās multimillion dollar sponsorship of the NFL -- let users play an animated football game.

Other online advertisers have been following Visa's lead. While the now-infamous pop-under ads have attracted more attention, the new large-format ads are quietly populating pages all over the Web. The reason is simple: They seem to work.

According to a recent series of studies sponsored by The Interactive Advertising Bureau, MSN and Doubleclick, the larger formats were three to six times more effective than smaller ads in producing brand awareness. (Obviously, all three sponsors have a vested interest in seeing the new ads succeed.) While it's logical to assume bigger ads will produce better click-through rates, no statistics have been offered to support this contention -- lest the industry doesn't want to lend any support to a metric it is busy running away from.

Measurable or not, the bigger formats are selling for 20 to 30 percent more than standard banners, says Brian Quinn, VP of ad sales at Real Media, a sales agency that represents Playboy.com, Investors.com, and other sites.

One of the reasons they're so effective: In addition to being physically larger, the new standards explicitly support rich media ads using Macromedia Flash and other interactive technologies. Large ads enhanced with rich media like DHTML and Flash increased various branding metrics from 19 percent to 71 percent. Visa now uses Flash animation in almost all its online ads, large and small.

But interactivity can be intimidating to advertisers accustomed to static banners. "There's a lack of knowledge as to what's possible," says Tim McHale, chief media officer, at Tribal DDB, a New York Interactive ad agency with clients including McDonald's and Anheuser-Busch.

The online vets at Visa point out that Flash isnāt an end in itself. "There's still a fascination with what you can and can't do with bigger formats and rich media," says Jon Raj, director of advertising for e-Visa, "but every piece of creative has its place. A static 468 by 60 in the right place can still work."

Despite the higher prices, the new ad formats are helping Web sites retain old advertisers and attract new ones. "We're seeing people buy a skyscraper and a 468 by 60 on the same page, so they can really own the page,āā says Real Media's Quinn.

So far, Visa and other big brands have shied away from the most intrusive ad formats -- intertstitials, pop-ups and the dreaded pop-unders -- fearing they'll turn off more consumers than they attract. But the trend toward bigger ads does raise the ugly prospect of Web pages on which advertising crowds out content. 'We've gone from 'how completely user-friendly can I make this experience?' to 'how do we make this more of a advertiser-friendly marketing vehicle?'," says Evan Sternschein, Executive VP for Sales at Iwon.com.

Boosters of the new, bigger online ads dismiss such worries. In print media, they point out, ad-edit ratios have naturally settled in the 60/40 range; they expect something like that to happen online. "We have larger formats, but we don't have anything like a full-page ad, or a double-page spread," says Barry Salzman, president of global media at DoubleClick. "Print media has figured out the balance that makes it a viable business."

As online ads become more interactive, the folks at Visa think their branding power could begin to rival that of television and radio. Visa's Jon Raj says Internet ads can already do anything traditional ads can. "We've seen campaigns [that] support awareness of a new product or service, [that] drive traffic to particular sites and [that] support branding initiatives," says Raj.

No matter the technology, Visa's approach to online ads remains staunchly conservative. "Establish objectives, plan for measurement to gauge those objectives and be sure you donāt have separate brands on- and off-line," according to Gerry Sweeney, marketing VP at E Visa. Execution of the ads themselves, he says, come last.

But they should, of course, be really big.