Coming to your computer
You spend a lot of time online so you thought you were free from all those brain-dead TV commercials.
That was then. This is now. Because starting tomorrow, MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, among others, will run 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,” a New York Times report quotes John Vail, director for digital media and marketing for Pepsi-Cola North America, as saying here.
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, says Bob Tedeschi in his report.
“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.”
But unlike TV viewers, surfers won’t be deluged – not for now, anyway.
“According to Unicast, 100 million ads will be served to individual PC’s beginning tomorrow through the end of February,” says Tedeschi. “That may sound like a lot, but publishers, who can track a user’s repeat trips to a Web site, say they will generally limit a person’s exposure to the ads to one a day.
“Pepsi plans to distribute two ads, which have run on TV in the last few months.”
In Just Lunch a dog steals its owner’s sandwich and Pepsi, and replaces them with a cat. In Vacuum a vacuum cleaner hunts a Pepsi drinker and eats his pants. At the end of each, users will be shown links to more ads on the Pepsi Web site.
Wow.
“Yes, it’s intrusive,” Vail admits. “But I think customers will like it, because it will be so far superior to anything they’ve seen online.”
Is that a bit like “Our pain still hurts, but it’s better than their pain” – ?
January 19th, 2004 at 11:26 pm
When will advertisers get the fact that we don’t want their stupid intrusion based ads? I wonder how this works … it has to be either java or a plugin … if java… turn of the vm … if a plugin, don’t run it. Lamers!
January 20th, 2004 at 12:01 am
I am not registered with this site.
I absolutely abhor this idea and will encourage and conduct boycott of all products advertised in this way.
Alan P Wells
Las Vegas NV
January 20th, 2004 at 6:04 am
…blah, blah, blah
Does anyone else see the internet as being the poster child for “cause and effect”? If we’ll be getting adds on our screens a few things are bound to happen…
1) a lot of ppl will just suffer through it because they don’t want to make ripples in the water.
2) some folks will be so upset that they’ll delete the “web” from their life (or home) as much as possible.
3) it will push people to pirate bandwith or come up with a browser/plugin or something that’ll block the adds.
…i’m betting that the adds may not effect Macs or people who use firewalls that can block the port in which the add comes in on (because i doubt the adds will piggy-back the normal web traffic ports). well that’s
my 2¢….be well
-ZURIEL-
-zuriel-@spymac.com