Video aims to catch some eyeballs: Tools add sophistication to Web advertising industry

The Internet may be increasing in popularity every day, but advertising agencies and managers have been less than enthusiastic about investing in it, deterred by the lack of concrete proof that they have any claim on Web surfers' eyeballs.

But new technology that enables full-motion video and interactive advertising on the Web, coupled with the capability to track those eyeballs and learn more about the people behind them, has caused more than a few advertisers to change their minds.

"Advertisers said to us, 'How do we know that somebody is actually looking at this?'" said Doug Augustine, vice president of marketing and sales for InterVU. "When you add video to a banner ad, people are actually spending time looking at it, which ensures value to the advertiser."

InterVU's product, V-Banner ads, allows advertisers to incorporate video into their Internet banner ads. Once the advertising agency has created the videoclip for a particular Web site, InterVU stores the video at various delivery centers throughout its network. When an end user clicks on the ad, InterVU streams the video to that PC from the closest possible delivery center via the backbone of any one of the Internet service providers with which it has agreements, including MCI, UUNet and Genuity.

"We felt that by associating ourselves with only one backbone, we would only be as good as the performance of that [ISP]," Augustine said. "We opted to go across multiple backbones to increase the number of users to whom we're providing high-quality service."

Narrative Communications' Enliven 2.0 product also provides streaming video for Web advertisements, with the added feature of allowing advertisers to track what users are looking at on Web sites and gather demographic information about them.

Before the advertisement is delivered from the Enliven server to the PC, a small Java applet is downloaded to the user's computer, said Steve Banfield, product manager at Narrative. The applet then tracks how the user interacts with the ad, including where he hovers the mouse and what he clicks on.

Enliven also provides advertisers with the tools to collect demographic information, Banfield said. For example, a New Balance ad poses a few questions to users, then recommends a shoe suited to their running habits--a capability that both strengthens the New Balance brand name and provides the company with information about who is looking at their ads.

"Not only are they getting demographic information, but they know they're getting great information because it's coming directly from the users," Banfield said.

Providing a more sophisticated way to count eyeballs is an advantage in an industry in which advertisers historically have paid Web publishers based on click-throughs, he said.

"Publishers get paid more depending on click-through numbers, so they hope that you'll come to their site, click on an ad you like, go somewhere else and hopefully come back to the site someday," Banfield said. "If you spend a lot of time gathering content and designing the site, it seems self-defeating to have a goal that the user will read part of it and then go somewhere else."

Neither the Narrative nor the InterVU products require any plug-ins at the end user's site, a feature that appealed to Internet search engine Lycos, which uses both technologies in a Web advertising trial on its Lycos.com Web site.

"We don't like our users to have to be prompted to download a specific plug-in to see an advertisement," said Lauren Prescott, advertising products group manager at Lycos.

Lycos also likes the fact that the Enliven product can provide concrete numbers for advertisers, she added.

"The next generation of this is targeting the placement of ads and content to particular demographic profiles," said Prescott.

COM21 MODEMS USED IN CALIFORNIA

Palo Alto, Calif.-based cable operator Cable Co-op has launched a commercial deployment of a cable modem service for residential and work-at-home subscribers. The service currently has more than 60 customers and uses cable modems from Com21.

NETSPEAK TAPS FUSION FOR IP GATEWAY PRODUCTS

NetSpeak Corp., a developer of Internet protocol telephony gateway server products, will use Natural MicroSystems' Fusion IP telephony platform to build IP telephony products for the corporate and service provider markets. Fusion is a hardware/software platform that enables voice traffic to be transmitted over IP-based networks, including corporate intranets and the Internet.