Like many recent visitors to The New York Times' Web site, Mike Brittain was surprised to find an extra browser window loitering on his PC after he took his daily dose of news.
The window, which held an ad promoting X-10's "Tiny Wireless Video Camera," is known as a "pop under" ad, or a page that lurks behind the requested one and appears when the original window is closed.
"It was surprising but confusing--a distraction more than anything else," said Brittain, a student in digital media studies at the University of Denver.
Readers such as Brittain aren't the only ones struggling to understand such techniques. Net publishers are testing various ways of accommodating advertisers so they can draw in scarce online marketing dollars. So desperate are they to make money that otherwise conservative Web sites are using bigger, more-obtrusive ads to catch buyers' eyes--and the early results show that such ads are effective.
For example, Media Metrix reported Wednesday that X-10's ad campaign helped the company become the No. 5 Web property in May, ahead of sites such as Excite and Amazon.com. (Media Metrix credited the ads with driving 95 percent of the site's traffic.)
But the flip side is that publishers risk alienating readers and seeing their own traffic numbers fall--a fear that for years convinced many Web sites to avoid splashy pitches. For now, the pendulum has swung far in the advertisers' direction.
Various sites deliver pop-up windows that omit the delete button or place it off the screen, for example, making the window difficult for visitors to close. Some sites set a timer on pop-ups so they appear every 15 minutes. One site, Passthison.com, launches three browser windows with various promotions once a visitor tries to exit.
"The name of the game is becoming profitable," said Michael Tchong, editor of Iconocast, an online advertising newsletter and site. "Everybody's scrambling for dollars, and everybody knows that marketers are reluctant to advertise on the Web because they've heard it doesn't work."
The new online marketing
What do advertisers want? Bigger, flashier and harder-to-ignore formats that in some cases go farther even than television in intruding on their audience.
Eager to please, publishers are engaging in a wave of experimentation that has spawned larger interactive banners and pop-ups on sites such as the NYTimes.com, Fortune, MSNBC, CNN and Yahoo. Others use streaming video and audio banners, and the most extreme offer a host of free-form technologies that let marketers command an entire Web page.
In one recent example, Ask Jeeves this week transformed its home page to a tropical theme for two days to promote 20th Century Fox's video release of the Tom Hanks hit "Cast Away." Among other things, an animated volleyball--a prop in the movie--bounced across the company's home page as an added attention-grabber.
"Advertisers are getting more for their dollar than they were a year ago simply because the dollars aren't there," said Denise Garcia, advertising analyst at Gartner.
