New Ad Attacks

Ads Get Flashier, More Personal

No longer are online advertisers content to litter your screen with pop-ups, banner ads, and the like--now you're in for a multimedia ad experience. As you've likely noticed when you surf the Web, more sites (including PCWorld.com) are using ads that play short video clips--like previews for an upcoming movie--or interrupt your browsing by appearing between pages as you surf, or drop down over the content you're trying to access, often with accompanying music or other animation.

In 2004, advertisers spent about 8 percent of their total online advertising dollars on such ads, called rich media ads; that should grow to 25 percent by 2008, according to EMarketer, a New Yorka??based research company. Better video compression and steady growth in the number of broadband users make the ads possible--and you'll be seeing lots more of them.

Web sites claim that they receive far less negative feedback about rich media ads than they do about pop-ups, says Jim Nail, a principal analyst with Forrester Research. People may be less offended by the ads because they usually disappear on their own, and because they tend to be more entertaining than pop-ups, he says.

Many sites cap the frequency of rich media ads, too, in some instances exposing users to a maximum of one such ad per day, Nail says. Advertisers initially did the same thing with pop-ups; later, however, as online marketers grew frantic to bring in more customers, the pop-up floods began.

Targeted Ads

What else is slouching toward you online? "One of the biggest trends right now is behavioral targeting: the ability to identify a user's patterns online and serve them more relevant ads," says Greg Stuart, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Behavioral targeting isn't new. Doubleclick (used by PCWorld.com) tried and then ended such a service in the late 1990s because irate users feared their online habits were being tracked and matched to their name and postal address. But the most prominent new service, Tacoda's Audience Match Network (launched last November) doesn't identify individuals, say industry analysts.

Tacoda's ads--simple text ads with supposedly high relevance--resemble those developed as part of Google's AdWords program, which displays ads related to the terms a Google user has searched for.

With Tacoda, "users are placed into buckets, depending on their browsing habits, of areas they seem to be interested in," says Dave Morgan, the company's CEO. A user who reads an article at USAToday.com on new cars, for example, may be labeled a car buyer. When she surfs to another Tacoda network site, she may see ads designed for car buyers. "No actual personal information about consumers is used in our service," Morgan says. Nevertheless, Tacoda's network may track users for significant lengths of time, depending on whether the user's classification is a temporary condition, such as car buyer, or indicates a long-term hobby, such as golfing.

According to a company statement, by the end of its launch phase in early 2005, Tacoda expects more than 1000 advertisers and 1000 sites will be using the service.

Because Tacoda uses cookies to track users, employing a cookie blocker should prevent inclusion in the service. No rich-media ad blockers exist yet, but they should appear as these ads become ubiquitous.

Liane Cassavoy