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.
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