Yet again AdAge has enlightened me to an innovation in online advertising. Today, they released information that major US Web publishers such as NYTimes.com, ESPN.com and CNN.com are preparing to go big, very BIG. In fact the publishers think they know what will attract more brand advertising online. In their quest for brand-advertising dollars, 26 members of the group are adopting a new set of three interactive ad units to get agency minds on better creative and off low-CPM ad networks. The publishers, including Martha Stewart Living, Conde Nast Digital, Discovery and CBS Interactive, have agreed to only direct-sell the new units, and not sell them through ad networks. The new ads will run alone on the page, giving advertisers exclusivity that publishers hope they’ll pay a premium for.
The move by these publishers is meant to address the increasingly bifurcated world of web publishing. On the one hand, there are the custom branded campaigns sold directly, which garner high ad rates as measured by the cost to reach a thousand viewers. On the other are typical banner ads sold by ad networks for pennies on the dollar.
The new units are designed to move more money to the high end and give advertisers a format that scales across many publishers, in hopes of drumming up higher-end branded campaigns that can run on pages other than only the publishers’ home pages. The publishers hope to present a branded alternative to the standard banner ads, which helped the online ad industry get off the ground but also have been commoditized by ad networks and are blamed for stifling creativity.
So what are the three new units? Well, the three formats were derived from units some publishers had already been using but that hadn’t been standardized across multiple sites. They include a tall, wide vertical unit called a “fixed panel,” an oversize box with page-turn and video capability called an “XXL box,” and a “pushdown” ad that expands from a thin strip to take over the top third of a page.
Members of the OPA hope it works: Online display advertising is looking at a flat year in 2009, growing slightly to $8.27 billion from $8.1 billion in 2008, according to Citibank internet analyst Mark Mahaney.
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