Billboards on the Infobahn

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Berkeley Systems, known best for its After Dark screensaver, is one of the early adopters of this kind of ad in its new online version of the You Don't Know Jack game show, which is available starting today on the Web. To play the games, users download a 2.5MB player to their hard disks. Then, the game streams over the Internet onto their screens, along with ten-second, full-color, full-sound, animated commercials.

The current version of the game begins with a ten-second spot for 7-Up that looks and feels a lot like, well, television. That's precisely the goal.

Berkeley Systems isn't the only company to give these types of ads a shot online. PointCast also has been running little animated advertisements in its screeensaver and newsreader the last few months.

"Broadcast television works because at some level there's value in the advertising. Advertisers are looking for better and more intrusive ways of getting their message across," Starwave's LeFurgy said. "That's why PointCast has captured the imagination of advertising people. It's more similar to television. It's interruptive."

He added, however, that bringing ads to the Web is "a double-edged sword" because Netizens, unlike the couch potatoes of the TV generation, are used to surfing unemcumbered, free of pesky commercials. "The Web is this freak of nature where you're getting all this great content, but you're not paying for it anywhere," LeFurgy said. Noting that there needs to be a balance in the types of advertisements used, he added, "if you load up your site with interstitials, surfers will say, 'Enough.' People don't want to spend time loading ads."

That's why it is important to choose the audience most likely to accept interstitials in the first place. And then the Web developer must still be careful not to overwhelm the user.

The producers of the Jack show were worried about just that. "We were afraid people were going to be turned off by the advertising," said Leslie Mullens, the show's producer.

Mullens added she has been pleasantly shocked by beta testers, who for the most part loved the ads. "The surveys were saying, 'Your ads are amazing. They're so cool.' We're making them just as entertaining as the game. It takes it to a whole new level on the Web."

Carlick at Poppe Tyson agreed that Berkeley Systems is on to something big.

"Ads that move more, have more animation, more sound, are more complex, and use all the tricks of the trade that people have grown accustomed to in television and radio will be in the pallet of the Web advertiser over time," he said. "These are pretty nice first steps towards solving the technology problems that let us deliver."

But even if these ads didn't require the user to download a player separately, or even if they could be used in the normal course of surfing, they still wouldn't work for everyone because not everyone would sit through them.

"If your Web experience is broken up by this interstitial, you'd probably stop using the Web. If every time you flipped from one Web page to another you got caught with a little vignette, that would kill the experience for you. It's kind of a tricky thing," said Jeff Ratner of Young & Rubicam.