Competition spawns pushier Web advertising
Kansas City Business Journal - by Stephen Roth Staff Writer
As vice president and director of Bernstein-Rein Advertising Inc.'s interactive group, Janice Barbosa has her choice of many technological toys to grab attention for her clients on the Internet.
Earlier this year, the group linked a "bridge" site to iVillage.com that extolled Wal-Mart's pricing plan and directed users to http://www.walmart.com. Next month, Bernstein-Rein will try something more daring for Thrifty Car Rental -- an ad called an "eye blaster" in which animated cars drive across a Web page and eventually park inside a Thrifty banner ad.
"It's a bit of a frontier in terms of the types of creativity you can explore," Barbosa said of the Internet. "We're seeing much more of an opportunity than we have in the past. Forced creativity is what it has become."
The recession and a need by Internet portals and advertisers alike for more sales is forcing a trend toward more creative, aggressive ads on the Web. In meeting that demand, agencies specializing in ads that pop up, spawn and crawl across Internet pages walk a fine line between grabbing consumers' attention on the Internet and annoying the heck out of them, experts said.
Web tracking firm Cyveillance in Arlington, Va., last month released a study examining advertising tactics on more than 100,000 Web sites. It found mainstream acceptance of tactics once limited to pornography sites. The report found that 30 percent of the nation's top sites employ pop-up ads. "Mouse-trapping" tactics, which prevent users from exiting a page, were found on 5.2 percent of surveyed sites.
Brian Murray, Cyveillance's senior director of client services, said Web portals such as Yahoo! and MSN.com are allowing more intrusive advertising to pump up sales. In an interview last week with Reuters, Gregory Coleman, Yahoo! executive vice president, said the company had to feature more aggressive ads to sustain its business model.
"They want their consumers to have an experience on the Web site similar to the store," Murray said of the Web portals. "But these are things that would not be acceptable in the in-store environment."
Internet advertisers should guard against turning consumers off with overly aggressive tactics, said John McGuigan, director of integrated media for Kansas City advertising firm VML.
"It could become more of an irritant," he said. "There's a lot of pressure on these Web sites to take whatever advertisers want. They aren't hitting the numbers they once were, so everything's a lot more negotiable."
Interactive advertising has generated $5.5 billion in revenues for the first nine months of 2001, according to the New York-based Internet Advertising Bureau. It's an evolving world in which vertical "skyscraper" banner ads share time with ads that spawn new browser boxes when a Web site is downloaded. Other types of ads are more intrusive, flying across Web pages or filling computer screens while a Web page is being downloaded.
"The most aggressive sites continue to be the pornography sites, followed closely by the gambling sites," Murray said. "But you're also finding more aggressive behavior on totally mainstream sites."
Barbosa said she wouldn't rule out most of the tactics now available to online advertisers. The difference in whether an ad is annoying or informative to consumers, she said, is where and when you place it.
"If I were to send a pop-up ad in an entertainment area, that would be intrusive," she said. "If I did it on a car rental information site, that would be help."
Barbosa does oppose the use of spam, or unsolicited e-mail advertisements. Other agency executives said they would never use Web pages that users have to click several times to escape.
"Mouse-trapping is something you just don't do," said Bridget McKinley, interactive account executive at Sullivan Higdon & Sink. "You want to give the user a pleasant experience. You want them to come in and stay a while, but you don't want to trap them."
Area advertising executives said they are only starting to explore the Internet's potential for revenues and creativity. Old, ill-placed banners are giving way to "rich media" ads with streaming graphics strategically placed on Web pages and search sites frequented by a target audience.
Internet advertising is easier to track than other media: Third-party servers measure the number of clicks each ad receives. Embedded "cookies" follow users, sometimes for months, from the instant they click on an ad to when they make an online purchase with the advertiser.
Kathleen Markham, group manager of Sprint Corp.'s online acquisition division, said the cost of online advertising is less than half what it was in the spring. Many Internet portals that had charged advertisers based on the number of users who clicked on an ad now charge by how many sales are closed as a result of the ad.
"It kind of moved from cost-per-click to cost-per-acquisition. That takes the risk away from Sprint," Markham said. Sprint unveiled a rich media e-mail campaign this summer.
VML scored with a streaming video ad it placed on NFL.com for RCA during and after the 2001 Super Bowl. The ad, which demonstrated RCA's high-definition television technology with a replay from the game, garnered a click rate close to 3 percent -- a rate of 0.3 percent is considered good -- McGuigan said.
"It has to be the right product at the right place and not terribly annoying," McGuigan said.
Amy Vranicar, media supervisor for NKH&W Inc., said Internet advertising "can be a matter of trial and error." The Kansas City firm, which does Internet advertising for Sprint, the American Angus Association and Wolferman's, closely monitors click-through rates for each of its online ads and will pull ads within a week or so if users aren't responding.
"It's a fine line between getting a client's message out there and making people irritated," Vranicar said. "We don't do a lot of pop-ups or streaming video where you have to sit and watch it for a while."
Reach Stephen Roth at 816-421-5900 or by e-mail at sroth@bizjournals.com.
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