March 11, 2004

An online survey of 1,700 Internet users who saw the full-motion commercials, which ran from late January until late February, showed that viewers found them less annoying than some marketers had expected.

If you missed the commercials served up 80 million times recently in the Internet's biggest test of television-style video ads, stay tuned - or beware. Encouraged by the initial results, advertisers have begun a new round.

Indeed, just 28 percent found them annoying - compared with 38 percent of TV viewers, on average, who found commercials annoying in three separate studies. The survey on Web commercials was paid for by the advertisers.

"I was astounded by the results," said Judy Gern, who directs the online ad campaigns of the Internet phone company Vonage for the interactive division of Carat, a media company. "There's absolutely no question we'll be doing this again."

The Vonage ads were similar to others in the test, in that the company simply took video that had run on television and placed it on about.com, www.espn.com and other Web sites.

The ads rely on technology that invisibly loads the video while readers browse through a site, then runs the commercial at 30 frames a second - the same speed as TV - in a window that occupies most of the browser space. Users can also close the ad.

In addition to Vonage, the advertisers included Honda, Warner Brothers, AT&T; and Pepsi.

While marketers have increasingly used so-called streaming video to run ads online in recent years, advertisers and Web site executives say the experience is choppier and more prone to glitches than the full-motion ads, which use technology created by Unicast, a New York-based online advertising company.

Other sites, like ESPN's, had previously used full-motion ads but in smaller formats requiring special software.

The online survey, conducted by the advertising research firm Dynamic Logic, found that video commercials vastly outperform conventional online ads on measures like brand awareness and purchase intent.

Unicast said last week that several Internet publishers, including www.weather .com and www.forbes.com, would be joining those accepting the video commercials.

James Nail, an analyst with the technology consultancy Forrester Research, noted that more than 30 percent of those who watched the video commercials viewed most or all of the them, nearly even with the 35 to 40 percent who watch most of a typical TV commercial. "I didn't expect consumers to have as much patience online as they do with TV," Mr. Nail said.

But Web publishers are not yet prepared to try the users' patience. Although they can charge up to three times as much for these ads than static Internet ads, some Web site executives say they will only show one such ad daily to their Internet users.

"It's such a disruptive moment," said James Spanfeller, chief executive of Forbes.com. "You've basically asked to go to a Web page and all of a sudden you're not there. There's no science to the frequency cap, though. It's more that we think it's the right thing to do."

Source: New York Times
www.nytimes.com

        

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