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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