Since the birth of the commercial Internet, publishers and online marketers have grumbled about the dearth of good advertising. Even the best ad agencies, they complained, were churning out work that looked as if it had been done by the custodial staff, rather than top designers.
It was certainly true that the best creative talent was not working on the Web. The ad agencies had all spun off Internet businesses in the late 1990s, hoping to capture some of the initial offering treasure that investors had showered on so-called interactive agencies like Razorfish and MarchFirst. But the spinoffs effectively created a gulf between Web designers and their more experienced advertising colleagues, who remained on the parent firm's television and print accounts. But the agencies had another excuse: Few people were able to pack a compelling message into those small rectangles known as banner ads at the top of most Web pages.
That was especially true when publishers ruled out animation and sound effects, as many had, in the name of making pages work fast enough for people using pokey dial-up modems.
The situation appears to be changing. The agencies are merging their Internet business units with the parent companies, having given up hope of a Wall Street windfall.
In the meantime, the larger advertising formats adopted by Internet publishers earlier this year have proved an enticing canvas for designers -- more so because more publishers are granting them the freedom to use multimedia.
Last week, Yahoo rolled out a series of ads on behalf of One Media, a design magazine and Web site. The ads feature 30-second vignettes from five well-known designers, including the architect Michael Graves and the fashion designer Paul Frank. Each ad played on an ``L-rec,'' the term for a large rectangular format that has come into vogue since it was introduced in February.
Dana Lyon, founder and chief executive of One Media, said traffic on the Web site jumped 100 percent one day after the ads appeared. ``It's been huge for us,'' said Lyon, who is the former publisher of Wired magazine.
Lyon said the new ad sizes were instrumental in getting the designers to agree to the effort. ``Before, you couldn't do as much with this medium,'' she said. ``It's hard to jump up and down about a banner.''
Julie Bauer, managing partner of the New York office of Saatchi and Saatchi, a global advertising company, agreed. ``Until there was a better canvas to work on,'' she said, ``it was very difficult to get much interest from the traditional creative folks." But, Bauer noted, ``It's still a challenge to get people to work on banners, unless they're part of a bigger thing.''
Designers of Internet ads have been able to take part in bigger things in the nine months since Saatchi folded its Web unit, Darwin Digital, into the main agency. Instead of creating an Internet campaign that is distinct from the advertiser's television and print campaign, design teams at Saatchi are working on each simultaneously. ``That integration, for us, has greatly improved the creative'' level of online ads, Bauer said.
Of course, such integration may not have happened if the markets had not stiff-armed the Internet last year. Had the market remained healthy, Internet publishers like Yahoo might have been reluctant to allow more video and audio on their sites, for fear that the distractions and potentially slower-loading pages would alienate users. Now, Yahoo is apt to do anything to attract advertisers, as evident in a recent ad for the Ford Explorer, which ran in May.
In that ad, which was designed by the agency J. Walter Thompson, visitors to Yahoo's front page saw birds flying from the banner ad at the top to another ad on the right side of the page. There, the birds started pecking at bird seed, revealing an image of a Ford Explorer. When users clicked on the Explorer, the Yahoo page shook as the sound of an engine started. The page finally faded to white, then gave way to a full-size photograph of the Explorer.
``Users liked it a lot,'' said Murray Gaylord, Yahoo's vice president for brand marketing, ``They said `As long as you don't do this to me every page, all day long, this was fun.'''
The challenge is striking the right balance to satisfy users, advertisers and shareholders. ``We'll just keep trying and testing and using our judgment to make sure we don't go over the line,'' Gaylord said.
``Better ads have started to come along, and we'll see more and more as people start to understand the various things you can do out there.''
Rich LeFurgy, chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group representing online publishers and advertising agencies, agreed that ``things are getting better.'' But, he said, Internet advertising still ``remains a creative wasteland.''
LeFurgy said the new formats had shown promise as forums for improved creativity -- a contention that he said would be bolstered by research coming later this month from his bureau, showing the ``strong impact'' the formats have on response rates. (Lyon, of One Media, says the so-called click-through rates of the new formats are triple those of banner ads.)
The better performance of such ads should come as little surprise, given studies of other multimedia advertising formats. For instance, a recent study by Harris Interactive, a research company, found that Internet users who had watched multimedia ads from Unicast, an online advertising company, could recall those messages as well as they could recall television ads.
Allie Shaw, Unicast's vice president for marketing, said that about 93 percent of those who use the company's multimedia ad technology, called the superstitial, are traditional advertisers, such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Kmart. Superstitials are large-format, multimedia ads that load in the background as users browse a page, then appear when the user clicks to go to a new page. The result is that the user sees a commercial as the new page loads.
Rick Boyce, chief executive of Snoball.com, a network of sites aimed at young adults, said the major movie studios had also brought a new level of creativity to their online ads. ``We've seen much more experimentation from them,'' Boyce said, ``probably because they basically have to build instant brands.''
Boyce pointed to the ad for Moulin Rouge, the 20th Century Fox film, as a particularly good example of recent marketing creativity. The ad was essentially a movie trailer, modified for the Web. ``Those kinds of things reflect well on us, and validate what we do as publishers,'' he said. ``And they also help make the Internet a more interesting place.''
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