Chapter 3

The Buck Spangled Banner

Page 2

The challenge is to have as much impact as possible in a space that's essentially an inch high and eight inches long on a nice big screen. It sounds like a tiny piece of real-estate. Imagine trying to squeeze something provocative in the space of a 1/8th display ad in a magazine. On TV you might think of it as a 5 second spot. But given the state of the art, it's actually a bigger area than it sounds.

In practice, banners are more eye-catching than the rest of the screen. They can blink, bounce, and whirl. They can also be the first image to load so they're the center of attention. They can be at the top of the page as well as the bottom. They can show up right in the middle of the article you're trying to read.

But the typical banner lives near the top, under the Web page masthead, or title, and it works as hard as you can make it to distract people from their appointed rounds. Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0 and well known technology observer likes to point out that the most important finite resource in the late 20th century is people's attention. When you're trying to distract them from Web activities, your creative has to work much harder than other media

Can Your TV Spot Stop A Train?

When sitting on the couch in full potato-mode, the average human requires several seconds to recognize that the television show that has them mesmerized has been replaced by an ad. They are at rest. The idea of sitting down in the evening to watch TV implies that the kids have been fed, the pets have been let in or out and it's time to relax for a spell.

Your ad only has a few seconds to capture their imagination before they leap up and head for the kitchen. Even worse, with a minuscule flick their thumb on the remote, they can send your half-minute masterpiece into video purgatory. But you do have a few seconds to grab them by the throat and stop their train of thought long enough for them to get the message.

Sitting in front of the television for an hour takes an hour. But it's a different hour than is spent elsewhere. The TV watcher's experience of an hour of TV time is relative compared to other activities where they might encounter your ad. Let's give the perception of this hour in front of the tube a rating of H1.

With a rating of only H1, the expectation of a TV ad having some important information is pretty low. It may be entertaining, it may be amusing, it may be just noise. But it isn't keeping them from anything really important, so they watch. An hour goes by pretty fast and soon, it's time for bed. H1.

Can Your Display Ad Catch A Train?

The mood is different when it comes to reading a magazine. It may well happen in front of the television, but more likely it'll be over lunch, on public transportation, in the bathroom or in bed. People reading magazines are more involved with the media than when they watch TV. They have to create pictures in their heads based on the words they read. They think about what they're reading, rather than letting images from the television wash over them while they wait for the next murder, car chase or explosion.

People reading magazines are actively looking for information. They want to know about the latest in fishing flies, fruit-filled pies or Whitehouse lies. They're seeking. Because this time with a magazine is more concentrated and uses a more focused attention, one hour deserves a perceptual rating of H2-- it feels like two hours in front of the idiot box.

It's harder to catch their eye as they flick from page to page. They're concentrating on what kind of bulbs they want for their spring garden. If your ad is for the most beautiful irises money can buy, you probably hit the right person at the right time and made a sale. It's not so easy on the Web.

Can Your Banner Derail A Train?

Surfing the Web warrants a perception rating of H7. First of all, you're not in the comfort of your den resting languidly on your couch. You're not casually sipping tea while leafing through the latest issue of the New Yorker. You're not even remotely comfortable.

You are sitting in a chair designed to be good for you rather than cozy. You are perched in front of a device that was designed by engineers rather than artists. You are at work. You are looking for something. This is borne out by the PC-Meter Sweeps Q4 1996 of the Top 25 Consumer Web Sites (www.npd.com/q4cht1.htm) (Figure 3.6). They found that six of the top dozen were search engines.

Figure 3. PC-Meter shows search engines as the most often visited category on the Web.

Web surfing is fascinating. Web surfing is entertaining. Web surfing down right fun. For a while. Then the Web becomes a means to and end; a tool for finding that one piece of information you need to finish that report, finish installing that sound card or finish learning about that case of measles your son brought home from school. It's work.

One solid hour in front of the computer does not go by in the blink of an eye. You are focused and concentrating and engaged. At this point, shaking you from your intended goal is not going to be easy.

The job of the banner is to totally derail your train of thought. As you sit before your keyboard in anticipation of a pointer to the answer to all of your measles fears, up pops an ad that says, "Organic Gardening Isn't Just a Bunch Of Manure. Click here to find out why" (Figure 3.7).

Figure 3.7 Want to know about measles? How about gardening instead?

So you see the problem. Trying to make a person on a mission, with a specific goal in mind, engaged in an activity that ranks as being 7 times as involving as television, go to a site hosted by a federation of national and local environmental and conservation charities. It's a stretch.

The types of banners on the Web are not the most engrossing pieces of art. They're not the most exciting bits of information. Most of them don't rate a second glance (Figures 3.8 - 3.12)

Figure 3.8 BigYellow offers advice

Figure 3.9 Woman's Wire avoids being precise

Figure 3.10 Firefly overdoes concise

Figure 3.11 Holiday Inn does the tie-in device

Figure 3.12 Microsoft tries to entice

Figure 3.13 Parent Soup hopes chat will suffice

Your ad has to be so arresting, so compelling, so interesting, to completely derail a train of thought and make that hand slide over and click!

In an attempt to be as arresting as possible, the first impulse is to make the banner as eye-catching as possible. If you do, you fall into the First Trap of the Internet: using too much bandwidth.

Bandwidth, Bandwidth, Bandwidth

I don't care if your banner is a still photograph of your product or a movie of your smiling CEO, it's too darn big. Yes, we covered the 468 x 60 pixel size limitation above, but this is about file size, not screen size.

A 468 x 60 banner file can be 10k, it can be 100k, it can be 1,000k (that's a megabyte by the way) and still look just the same. The difference is a) how it was created, and b) how long it takes to download.

The Least Amount of Technology You Need To Understand

When somebody clicks on a link to your Web site, they don't come to your site, it goes to them. Here's how it works with an ad:

1. The user clicks.

2. A message is sent to the server of the site you paid to display your ad.

3. The server finds the page the user wants and reads it.

4. The server determines that the page in question is made up of some text and several images, one of which is your ad.

5. The server sends the page and then starts sending the images. It may have all of them on its hard disk, or it may pull you ad from your server, or the server of a network agency that worries about that for you (see Chapter ~ Ad Placement).

6. The page and the associated images are broken up into packets of about 1k each. A one k NotePad file on Windows 95 can hold the words found in this sentence and that's about it. Each packet contains the address of the client it's going to.

7. The packets are sent out onto the Internet to fend for themselves. They can all take different routes to get to the user's machine, it doesn't matter.

8. When the packets arrive at the user's machine, they are re-assembled into real files, stored on the hard drive in a cache (temporary) file, and displayed in the user's browser of choice.

Now comes the problem. With all of the above going on, there are several areas along the way that can slow down the whole process.

1. The user clicks. Nope, not much there we can do anything about.

2. A message is sent to the server of the site you paid to display your ad. Here's where the trouble starts. The message is sent by the user's machine to the user's access provider.

a) The connection between the user and the access provider may be a 14.4 modem. Unless you're certain your prospective customers will only be looking at your ad from their cubicles with dedicated T1 lines, you can be pretty sure that they're on a 28.8 modem at best.

b) The access provider's gateway machine is busy with other click-happy users.

c) The message goes out from the access provider to his access provider where there's another gateway machine (see b, above)

d) The message goes out over the Internet backbone which can be slow if it's presidential election night, there's another OJ verdict, or the Supreme Court rules about obscenity on the Internet.

4. The server determines that the page in question is made up of some text and several images, one of which is your ad. See #3, above.

5. The server sends the page and then starts sending the images. See #3, above.

6. The page and the associated images are broken up into packets of about 1k each. See #3, above.

7. The packets are sent out onto the Internet to fend for themselves. See #2, above. And we'll add another twist here. If your ad is coming from an advertisement service server (like DoubleClick or Excite - see Chapter ~), then there is another message that goes from the site your ad is displayed on to the site your ad actually lives on. This is the same as #1, above and we have to go through steps 1 through 7 for your ad, which is coming from a different machine.

8. When the packets arrive at the user's machine, they are re-assembled into real files, stored on the hard drive in a cache (temporary) file, and displayed in the user's browser of choice. Now we have to deal with the question of the end user's machine. Are we dealing with a state-of-the-art UNIX workstation with gobs of memory? Or are we dealing with the old 386 PC that your prospective customer brought home from the office when they upgraded her machine there?

You Only Have One Shot At A First Impression

Each of the steps above plays a part in getting your message to your prospect. If any of those steps causes your message to show up late, the user has two possible impressions: poor or none.

Picture a television set that took from one second to sixty seconds to change channels. Oh, you say, one second isn't that long. Remember, you're used to changing channels in the time it takes to snap your fingers. Now think about the difference between snap and "one-thousand-one" (or "one-chimpanzee" if you grew up in my house). Now multiply that by sixty and you have a good idea how frustrating it is to wait for a banner ad to load.

So the first impression your prospect has of you is that you are making it difficult for them to do whatever it is they're trying to accomplish. The alternative impression is no impression at all.

I'm a pretty consistent user of AltaVista (www.altavista.digital.com) and I'm pretty adept at scrolling down to the found documents before the ad shows up. When AltaVista replies to a search, the masthead, the banner ad and the introductory text take up the entire page on my terminal (Figure 3.14).

Figure 3.14 AltaVista fills the screen and forces the user to scroll to see found documents

It's quite simple for me to miss the message when anxiously awaiting the fruits of AltaVista's labors because the text shows up before the pictures (Figure 3.15). I'm busy scrolling down the page while AltaVista is busy painting the banner at the top. The top has shot off the top of the screen before the banner is in place.

Figure 3.15 While the ad banner is painting, the surfer is scrolling and may never see the ad.

But you can rest assured that the site hosting your ad has registered this event as an impression and will happily charge you for it.

With All That Against You-- Don't Fall Flat On Creative

In a classic example of poor creative meets bad placement on an H7 medium, we have the entry from Proctor & Gamble (Figure 3.16).

Figure 3.16 Proctor & Gamble place a curious banner on a curious spot.

Let's assume you're deeply interested in Aboriginal Studies at the moment and you are thrilled to find that Yahoo! has an entire category on same. You are mere seconds away from making the vast Internet open its secret databases to your inquiring mind.

But wait! Before you click, you notice the banner demanding that you, "CLICK HERE TO LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE". Surrounded by modern day hieroglyphics, these words are baffling. They decided to play the curiosity card and it seems to be working. You are just about to let your curiosity get the best of you when you see the words just below the banner that say, "Click Here for The Tide Clothesline."

The Tide Clothesline? Foreign language? It's all too much, and, just as they had hoped, you click, just to find out what these people are up to. And what do you find? Well, the Tide Clothesline, of course (Figure 3.17). But when you arrive, you realize you can leave your English-Whatever, Whatever-English phrase-book behind.

Figure 3.17 Your quest for a new language ended up leaving you twisting in the wind.

There is nothing, and I mean nothing at all on this page that ties in with learning a foreign language. The message is clear: "We're Procter & Gamble. We know everything there is to know about being clean. You're surfing the Internet. Everybody knows that people who surf the Internet are hygienically challenged. You don't even speak our language."

It's enough to make you want to throw in the towel and join the group calling for an end to standards, the end to commercialism on the Net and rally to give the Grand Canyon back to the Indians.

Raising The Bar

There's nothing that can be done about bad creative but lament and pray you can do better. It's a fine art. I'll try to divine its mysterious ways in order to give you a bit of an edge in Chapter ~ What Makes People Click. In the meantime, the state of the banner technology art marches on.

In an effort to provide more eye-appeal and provide more opportunities for clickthrough without overtaxing the systems that hold the Internet together, the Weberati have fallen back on the tried and true-- technology. They went and animated the banner.

Banners That Move

Animation has come to the Web banner in a handful of ways and the results are all pretty much the same; it takes longer to download and it makes more people click. A closer look at the higher clickthrough numbers will be found in the chapter titled: What Makes People Click. Here, we cover a few basics such as the different types of animation and how they look.

I promise not to delve into the technical intricacies of programming computer animation. Creating animation belongs to the graphic artists and the technicians. They can worry about whether you should use an animated gif (a series of still pictures in an animation loop), or streaming technology (a constant stream of image data sent to the browser to play a whole clip in quasi-realtime), or Shockwave files (requiring your prospects to have already downloaded the Shockwave plugin and installed it).

I'll leave that to people like Nicola Brown, Peter Chen, David Miller, and Paul Van Eyk who put together Designing Web Animation published by New Riders, August 1996, and Dave Taylor who authored the more up to date Creating Cool Html 3.2 Web Pages published by IDG Books, January 1997. They know what your programmers and graphic artists should know.

You should worry about bandwidth and whether you ad is doing the job. Just as you don't pay strict attention to how your brochures are printed, you only worry that they look right. A quick trip to some of the places that show banners for a living and you're sure to come across some that move.

Oh Say, Does That Buck-Spangled Banner Yet Wave?

AltaVisa was my very favorite marketing Web site. In fact, I wrote an article about it in Webmaster Magazine (November, 1996 www.web-master.com) which included in part:

The AltaVista search engine is a database of all the Web sites its spider can find, coupled with an index and a query tool. Did we really need another Web site to help us find Web sites? What could DEC offer that would make a difference? Why should AltaVista be getting more than 14 million hits per day? And if it's that popular, why isn't DEC selling banner space?

Because Alta Vista is a gift. It's DEC's way of giving back to the Net. In the spirit of that first gaggle of guys who were trying to make this gizmo work, DEC has created a search tool for the masses. It is giving freely of its development time, its hardware and its customer service department to make the world a little better place to live.

And the tooth fairy and Santa Claus are buying me a winning Lottery ticket this afternoon.

Digital isn't selling ad space because Alta Vista is itself an ad. It's an ad for Alpha computers, and it's a doozy. If you're looking for something out there on the Web, AltaVista is a fast way to find it. Very fast. Of course, running your query engine in 6 GB of RAM across 10 processors is a great way to expedite a search, and that's just one of five systems behind AltaVista. But as always with advertising, it's the perception that counts.

"Jeepers Clem, that li'l ol' Alpha sure do put on some speed."

"Yup, I reckon we oughta get us one o' them for the dynamic multi-dimensional analysis of our consolidated enterprise data."

"Reckon so."

Is this a successful marketing model for the Alpha? It certainly hasn't hurt. In DEC's third quarter of fiscal '96, big Alpha systems sales were up 60 percent. And the company has moved into a whole new product line: DEC now has an AltaVista Software Products division.

Under the vision banner of "OnSite Computing," DEC is offering AltaVista Search, AltaVista Mail, AltaVista Forum for conferencing, AltaVista Manager for applications and network connections inventory, AltaVista Firewall and AltaVista Tunnel security tools. This is not to say that DEC wouldn't have gone into these businesses anyway, but with Alta Vista it discovered something that Sun Microsystems had already learned: Sometimes the child outshines the parent.

Scott McNealy, after finishing his usual round of Microsoft bashing at Comdex 1996, in Chicago, said that within a year Java had become a bigger brand name than Sun. DEC saw the writing on the wall and named its Internet software products division after something that had garnered significant, positive attention out on the Net. Smart move.

AltaVista often shows up in lists of surfers' favorite search tools. It's so popular that Yahoo forsook its venture-capital cousin Infoseek for AltaVista. And, yes, I use it myself, all the time. It's fast. It's easy. It has no commercials!

In December, 1996 DEC decided to make a move to deliberately spoil the entire premise of my insightful article-- they started selling ads. And, in the never ending absurdity that is the Internet, the first ads they ran were for IBM! Go figure. Why am I telling you all this here? Because AltaVista's first ad was an animated gif (Figures 3.18 and 3.19).

Figure 3.18 The Internet makes strange bedfellows, including this ad from IBM on the Digital AltaVista site...

Figure 3.19... which was an animated gif.

Animation got more attention-grabbing, as people figured out how to make the movement less stilted and more fluid. One example is this series from Microsoft (Figures 3.20 through 3.24).

Figure 3.20 Microsoft wanted you to watch the cursor move up...

Figure 3.21 ...open a menu...

Figure 3.22...and make a selection.

Figure 3.23 Then Microsoft hoped you'd stick around long enough for the benefit statement...

Figure 3.24... and the tag line.

The Microsoft banner worked hard. It grabbed the eye, it showed off the ability to do Internet searches from the desktop and it moved fast enough in telling the story that the person seated in front of her H7 computer wasn't annoyed by it.

Another banner with a twist was from ZD-Net for a product called Password Pro. This one started off with what looked like a place to enter a password (Figure 3.25). Thousands of people, curious about a password field in a banner ad, moved their mouse to the field and clicked... only to discover they had just done the very thing ZD-Net was hoping for.

Figure 3.25 ZD-Net lures people to click with a false password entry field

Yahoo visitors who don't click are admonished that they had entered the wrong password (Figure 3.26). The finishing image (Figure 3.27) offers up a solution for a busy, password-protected world.

Figure 3.26 Informed that you had entered the wrong password...

Figure 3.27 ... the solution to password overpopulation is offered.

Of course, the natural reaction to this ad is to worry about the poor souls in need of such a software package. If you have too many passwords, perhaps you should get a life instead.

Another example is from LinkExchange (www.linkexchange.com) which is a Web advertising network. They offer the ability to place a banner on more than 50,000 Web sites. Their approach to the animated banner is simple, straight forward and attention getting; they use the Pop Quiz approach (Figure 3.28 - 3.31).

Figure 3.28 LinkExhange starts off with a challenge...

Figure 3.29 ...suggests the impossible...

Figure 3.30 ... offers an alternative...

Figure 3.31 ... and announces the solution.

The final example must be seen to be appreciated. Unfortunately, this ad doesn't exist in it's natural state anymore. It lived on the home page of the USA Today site (www.usatoday.com) (Figure 3.32).

Figure 3.32 USA Today had one of the best animated ads ever.

Fortunately, the ad lives in a preserved state on one of the best Web advertising resources on the Net: Microscope (www.pscentral.com).

The Microscope Weekly Web Ad Review

You can see the Honda sport utility vehicle perform at www.pscentral.com/20397/review1.html thanks to the efforts of Steve St. Clair and Rich Paschall. These two well documented ad men took it upon themselves to provide some applause for what they thought were a few of the best banners each week.

In doing so, they have unwittingly created an historical archive of a turning point in advertising history. This site is well worth a look and well worth a bookmark. A large tip of the hat to Steve and Rich.

In February of 1997, the USA Today Travel button in the upper left hand corner of Figure 3.32 was replaced with a Honda sport utility vehicle (Figure 3.33). As you watched, the vehicle drove down the page, under the column of text, looking like a mole traveling under your manicured front lawn. At the bottom, it disappeared for a moment, and then popped out in a banner to the lower right (Figures 3.34 - 3.35).

Figure 3.34 The Honda vehicle started at the top of the USA Today page...

Figure 3.35 ... worked its way under the text...

Figure 3.36 ... and popped out at the bottom in a different banner box.

This wasn't just a wowzer of a way to attract your attention, and it was. It also was a Web re-enactment of the Honda television ads where that same vehicle was seen driving through an entire newspaper. The cross-promotional element was ideal. Brilliant. A great example of the technology fitting the message.

Animation is fun, it's trippy, it's silly and it sure gets attention. In one of those statistical anomalies that happens on the Internet, any technology that's new, gets attention. Animated banner? Great! I'll click on it to see what else these people have come up with. Oh, it's a site selling laundry detergent?!? Get me outta here! Besides, I'm in search of the next tech legerdemain!

Banners Get Interactive

The next tech toy turned out to be a natural. Once people realized that banners could be more that just HTML, they started getting creative. After all, these are computers we're dealing with here and all you have to do is figure out the right software. Some of that figuring was done for us by people like Macromedia who made browser plugins like Shockwave (www.macromedia.com).

People had been using shockwave for a little over a year when somebody thought it might be fun to shock a banner.

Wanna Play A Game Of Nostalgia?

The first example to hit the screen was a Shockwave animation from Hewlett-Packard that let you play pong against the computer (Figure 3.36).

Figure 3.36 HP memorialized PONG in this banner that drew attention but didn't stick around for long.

As the puck bounce from side to side, an introductory message scrolled across the top: "Jerry here. I'm the HP engineer who designed this thing. It was supposed to be an ad banner, but, well, let's just say the coffee started to flow and things got a little weird around here. Kind of like when we made the mopier collate. You want to play? You're the one on the right Go crazy."

If the C|NET people don't clean out their archives, you can still play with this one at www.news.com/Banners/Shockwave/hp/pong/pong_big.banner.gif.dcr.

Working Smarter, Not Harder

But Shockwave wasn't necessary once it was realized that a banner could be more than a simple graphic or a complex animation file. It could also include some HTML of its own.

This example from CondéNet's Epicurious (Figure 3.37) added an HTML form that acted as a search tool. This quiet little banner allowed you to enter the name of your favorite culinary ingredient hit "search".

Figure 3.37 A little HTML can be a powerful thing as shown in this banner from Epicurious.

The result was to take you to the Epicurious site where a search had been performed and a very long list of recipes displayed which included the ingredient of your choice (Figure 3.38).

Figure 3.38 Instant gratification proved that the people at Epicurious understand the power of the Web.

Modem Media (www.modemmedia.com) has been creating online marketing for more than ten years. One of their vision statements is to "Create 'advertising' so compelling, they'll think it's a service." Jim Davis, Director of Creative and Brand Strategies, was downright impassioned at an Internet World conference where he told the audience to take the very best their Web sites have to offer and "bannerize the experience." The idea is to put your best foot forward and spread it around the Web as far and wide as possible where more and more people can be exposed to what you have to offer.

The team at Netgravity (www.netgravity.com) certainly understood that philosophy when they created this recipe search banner for Epicurious. Besides many other wonderful things found at the Epicurious site, their recipe database is a winner. The search-tool-banner lets as many people as possible know about and demonstrate the power of that offering. Very effective advertising.

Psychographic Self Selection

Honda Motor Cars liked the idea of the interactive drop-box and used it to match up their automotive models with the type of people they thought would be attracted to them. In this instance (Figure 3.39), the mulitple choice question can be answered in three ways. When I see curves ahead I... a) say three Hail Marys, b) add my own sound effect, or c) keep going straight."

Figure 3.39 Honda wants to know what kind of driver you are.

If you decided to say three Hail Marys, you were whisked off to see the 1977 Prelude (www.honda.com/cars/prelude). "The Prelude is all-new for 1997. With its new look and unparalleled performance, it's the perfect sports coupe for people who love to drive."

If you say three Hail Marys when you see a curve in the road, maybe you should be whisked off to the Understanding Panic Disorder page (www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/upd.htm) instead. I really missed the connection. But not so Steve and Rich at Microscope. They wrote, " So, if you pick the "say 3 Hail Mary's", you'll be presented with info on the Honda Prelude, a car that will handle those tough curves FOR you." Maybe, guys. Maybe

However, I change my tune if the selection was to "keep going straight." The next page is for that hot little number we saw cruising around the front page of USA Today, the off-road CR-V (Figure 3.40). You may quibble about the execution, but the concept is pure genius; let the customer tell you what kind of driver she is.

Figure 3.40 If you go straight when the road turns, you probably need one of these.

Banners can talk, banners can move, banners can pigeon-hole you into a consumer metric, banners can sing, dance, smile, and play tricks on you. But we all sat up and took notice when Casio put out a banner that makes the sale.

Banners That Take Orders

If you can fill out forms in a banner, you should be able to take the order, right? Right. But there's a bit more to it that that. Getting a name and an address is one thing, making a financial commitment is another. The financial part is tough enough that this one was created in conjunction with First Virtual (www.fv.com), a company providing payment systems for Web transactions.

We start with the banner itself, which starts out friendly enough. It quietly sits there and bounces the words "wrist power" at you and lets you know that it is "The TV remote you wear" (Figure 3.41)

Figure 3.41 This Java applet/banner gets your attention with high contrasting colors and words in motion.

If you sit and watch this banner it gets impatient and lets you know in no uncertain terms that you are supposed to take action. You are supposed to pass your mouse over the banner to "activate" it (Figure 3.42).

Figure 3.42 If you're slow on the uptake, this banner prompts you to take action.

Follow the instructions and the screen changes to announce the offer: buy one, get one free. (Figure 3.43). But that's not the end of the pitch. Casio wants you to know that these are no ordinary watches. Click on the "Product Info" button and you are encouraged to "Point to watches to see features (Figure 3.44).

Figure 3.43 If you interact with it, it makes the offer and gives you a three buttons to choose from.

Figure 3.44 More interaction is called for, asking you to pass the mouse over the watch of your choice.

Your mouse movements cause the text to change and offer descriptions of the watches. In addition, you are invited to click on the text so it will scroll down, revealing more information about the object of your vendible desire.

The Purchase button brings up a screen that asks for your name, address, phone, Virtual PIN number and includes a "submit" button. (Figure 3.45).

Figure 3.45 Taking the order is painless and all done without leaving the page on which the ad is displayed.

The "About 1VP" button is where Firt Virtual comes in with their 1 Virtual Place program. They handle the transaction from the monetary and security angles and the buyer must sign up with them before the transaction can be completed.

The breakthrough here is that the banner has stopped being a passive image that tries to cajole Web wanderers into clicking. They are not flat display ads that can provide value from a branding perspective, but are mostly trying to derail a surfer's train of thought. Now they are active, interactive, and completely self-contained. There's no reason to whisk somebody away from their focus on Aboriginal studies. They can complete the transaction without getting derailed.

If every banner can take the order, shine the shoes and wash the windows, will every banner become a shopping center unto itself? Unlikely. It simply means that banner creators have more choices. They will have to think a little longer and a little harder about what the purpose of a specific banner. Is it for branding? announcing something new? making a limited time offer? proposing a deep discount? Each of these intentions demands a different treatment. It's the same as asking of your print ad should be in the Sunday paper classified section or the back cover of Time magazine. It depends.

But there are some major caveats standing in the way of each banner becoming its own little home shopping channel. (shudder)

Playing The Technology Card

Using the latest technology as a gimmick to attract attention has several drawbacks. First, it draws people to your site for the wrong reason. Second, the thrill wears off quickly and the interest with it. Third, it ain't new for long. Finally, sometimes it just doesn't work, and that's likely to anger people.

Lookin' For Love In All The Wrong Places

Let's say you sell a 12x speed, 1MB buffer, 50MS access time, 5000kb/sec data transfer CD-ROM drive. OK then, let's say you sell drill presses. Fine.

You go to the trouble and expense of setting up a booth at an international trade show and you want to make sure you've got a way to get people into your booth. What do you do? You drag in the popcorn machine! No, wait. Your competitor did that last year and got all the foot traffic. This year, they'll probably do the same. So how do you counter? That's right-- the ice cream cart. Wheel in the ice cream cart and people will be lined up to give you their badges to swipe or their business cards to file. A crowded booth! Great!

The only problem is that you end up with a database of people who like ice cream at trade shows. You have no idea if they' would ever consider buying a drill press. The same thing happens when you chase after new technology as a way to draw attention to your Web site. The people who are interested in seeing more whiz-bang gizmos will come. But they won't buy drill presses.

If you're trying to figure out a way to use some of the nifty new technology you discovered on the Net last night, you're going after the problem from the wrong side. Yes, you should stay current on the new and the clever, but keep it in the back of your mind. Let it rest there until it's needed. You'll know when the time is right when your value statement, your main product differentiator, and your unique selling proposition suggest the use of a particular tool to illustrate a specific point.

If the positioning is that your product is faster than the rest, it would be ludicrous to use a giant Shockwave file and make people cool their heels while waiting for your message to reach their H7 mind-set. If your product is unique because it has a feature that nobody else has, that can only be deeply understood in motion, then you might get away with it. But if you're using Java banners to sing, dance and take names, you'll be shooting yourself in the foot.

Is That All There Is?

The neat, new way to stream video or include audio in your banner will attract the curious-- once. Some people will go back to the end of the line to get a second helping of ice cream, but once they've seen how your animation works and what happens when it reaches the end, there's no reason to go back. They might tell their friends. Their friends might come take a look. Their friends might be prospective customers. That's more than a stretch.

Given the rate of change on the Web (we've given up on dog years, we're now counting in flea years), new technology gets cold very fast. It's the been-there-done-that syndrome. Besides, have you heard about the next new thing?

The Next Insanely Great Thing

And once the next new thing hits the Web, the spotlight swings and the attention swings with it. But back on your banner, the same old, tired once-hip technology is starting to look a little tattered around the edges. Dated, faded and, eventually, hated.

Doesn't matter what the new techno-trick ad is for, when it hits the Web, it gets noticed if it has the very, very, very latest software driving it. But you sweated bullets for three weeks to create your new ad and built it using last week's techno-toy. Oops, sorry. You missed the window. The moving spotlight lights, and having lit, moves on.

Bleeding Edge Advertising

What if you were the only one on the planet with a fax machine. Either you're writing faxes nobody will see, or you have a long distance bill that's out of this world.

Not everybody has the latest browser version. not everybody has downloaded Shockwave. Most people have no idea if their browser is Java-ready. And that's just the icing on the cake. There's another reasons low-tech might be the high road: the new stuff might break.

I admit that I am not a normal Web surfer. I actively seek out the new and the different because my clients expect it of me. And yes, I also admit that I'm a nerd at heart and just can't wait to see what's going to happen next! As a result, I have learned to be careful.

Writing this book, I am always online to check facts, find examples and be there when that life-changing e-mail hits my screen. I usually run Microsoft Word and Excel, Netscape, Eudora and, when creating presentations, PowerPoint. When I'm about to embark upon a research foray into the wilds of the Web (which I do about every ten or fifteen minutes), I make sure I have saved everything in all my open applications. I call it insurance.

It doesn't take much for Netscape to lock up my system. Other applications are kind enough to simply hang and I can force them off my screen, but Netscape likes to take everybody with it when it goes. CTRL-S has become a nervous reaction. If somebody makes a sharp turn in front of me on the road, my thumb and index finger tap out the 'save' command on the steering wheel. Am I compulsive? Am I obsessed? Is anal retentive hyphenated?

No, I've just been burned by too many beta versions of this and odd combinations of that. When you've worked for an hour without saving your files and the whole system quits on you, you to rely on involuntary file saves.

So when your ad is the cause of me losing work I've already done, I'm more than annoyed. As it is, you only cause me to re-boot and restart all the applications I was running. You think this makes you look good? You think this helps build your brand? Think again.

The fact is, you can't know what applications are all running at the same time on somebody's computer. You can't know how many browser screens they have open and how many Java applets are loading and how many videos are streaming and how many gifs are animating.

If you want to have a place on your site where you show off your technical leadership in making the Web dance to your tune, I applaud you. As long as it is well marked. I will go to the Nokia Multimedia Gallery (www.nokia.com/gallery) to see the really cool Shockwave annimation Nokia has for their 9000 Communicator, but only after I have saved everything else first.

But what if I am not a nerd at heart? What if I don't want to see this fancy stuff? Then I need only rely on some help from the nearest twelve-year-old who can implement the software I need to never see another Web ad again. Scary, huh?

Banner Blockers

Axel Boldt describes himself as, well, nothing in particular. "I was a graduate student of Mathematics at the University of California in Santa Barbara until June 16. Right now, I'm nothing in particular." But Axel (www.math.ucsb.edu/~boldt) made an impression on the Web on December 11, 1994 by creating the Blacklist of Internet Advertisers. It was an effort to "to curb inappropriate advertising on usenet newsgroups and via junk e-mail," and the first entry is the historically appropriate team of Canter and Siegel, the green card lottery spammers.

While Axel's suggestions on what you can and should do to people who spam you boarder on the larcenous, his philosophy is right on the mark, "Advertising which I'm forced to read is bad, advertising which I actively have to seek is tolerable." Keep in mind that this is in reference to newsgroups and lists. He hadn't attacked the Web. Yet

Not content to leave the Web out of the picture, Axel went back to the drawing board and created WebFilter (www.math.ucsb.edu/~boldt/NoShit/index.html) (Figure 3.46). This is a nifty little program that lets you filter out those bits of the Web you don't want to see. It even has a script library for pre-defined sites. If you don't want to see ads on Yahoo!, Lycos, Hotwired, CNN, Netscape, InfoSeek. DejaNews, NandO Times, Playboy, Excite, WebCrawler, Galaxy, or Pathfinder, WebFilter is the answer. If you don't want to see ads on other sites, you can create your own filters.

Figure 3.46 WebFilter allows you to block ads that appear on specific pages.

Another one on the horizon is JunkBuster (www.junkbuster.com). Do these represent a threat to the value of the Internet as an advertising medium? Significantly less than the VCR spelled the death of television ads.

Some very small percentage of people will go out of their way to avoid advertising. The rest of us want to be sure we stay abreast and stay in tune with our peers. All editorial and no commercials make Jack a dull boy.

Banners Aren't The Only Choice

With all of the above choices for your banner, what is the most effective approach? Don't answer yet, because Monty Hall has more surprises for you behind door number two. Banners are not the end of the story. They're just the most popular story to date. There are numerous other ways to advertise on the Internet. It takes a whole 'nother chapter...

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