Television Ads Find New Home on Web

Whether you love them or you hate them, television commercials are here to stay. And with the help of advertising agency, Unicast, they are now going to annoy (or not) your Internet surfing experience.

Beginning tomorrow, web sites for ESPN, MSN, and ABCNews, just to name a few, will run 30-second television ads in a six week testing period. Honda, Pepsi, AT&T, and McDonald’s are among some of the conglomerates running their commercials.

Unicast chief executive Richard Hopple stated to Reuters, “This allows advertisers to take assets they already know are effective. There’s no learning curve involved.”

Although not a brand new concept (online ads have aired occasionally in the past) Unicast has updated these commercials to run at 30 frames a second for your viewing pleasure. This, coincidentally, is the speed of TV video. Subsequently, the ads are sharp and nearly identical to those observed on the television.

“This is the best full-motion, full-video TV ad technology that I’ve seen,” said James Nail, Forrester Research analyst, in a statement made to The New York Times.

The ads, which will not slow web surfing, will unknowingly load while users read specific pages; they then will display themselves across the entire browser when the surfers go to look at a new page. And although the commercials dodge pop-up blockers, they can easily be closed manually by the viewer.

Through the end of February, 100 million ads will find homes in personal computers across the nation. Unicast is hoping that an estimated 50 to 75 million users will notice these commercials, generally only once per day.

Running on Windows Media Player software, Hopple told The New York Times that he chose to release the new commercial technology due to the increasing use of broadband connections within homes. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, 38 percent of all households have high-speed connections.

Moreover, as indicated by comScore Networks, an Internet research firm, The Times reports that “of the 50 million people who surf the web at work, 94 percent have broadband connections.”

Although these ads will ultimately reach consumers during the day, an attractive benefit for advertisers trying to connect to them while at work, some online publishers aren’t jumping on the Unicast bandwagon.

“Thirty seconds strikes me as three times too long,” stated CBS Marketwatch executive, Scot McLernon, to The NY Times. “And there’s a lot of web use in open air workplace environments, so we’re looking for a more subtle sound experience.”

The pros and cons are undoubtedly present, but it certainly looks as though online audible ads will, over time, be accepted by more and more users and advertisers.

Elise Brahmer, media supervisor for ad agency RPA said to The Times: “When we run a spot on TV, we don’t really know how many people saw it, or were affected by it, or wanted to know more information.

“By putting the spots online, you can find out a ton of information” making an online video commercial “potentially more valuable than one on TV.”

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