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Forgive Me, Viewer, for I Have Confessed in a Banner Ad
By LOUISE STORY
Ever wanted to be in a commercial? Now is your chance if you live in the Washington area. A crew is shooting live advertising spots for five hours tonight beginning at 5 p.m. at the Rhino Bar & Pumphouse in Georgetown to promote “The Number 23,” a horror movie starring Jim Carrey.
Patrons at the bar are expected to be asked to divulge their personal obsessions in front of a camera, and the video is to be streamed live onto banner ads across the Internet tonight.
New Line Cinema, the film’s producer, is one of many advertisers shifting money toward online video rather than simple banner or display ads. Aside from one-time events like AOL’s Live 8 concerts in 2005, there has been little live footage on the Internet, and live advertising is a novel concept. Last year, Sun Microsystems broadcast a technology conference in real-time onto ads on business sites, but New Line’s ads are aimed at young consumers on sites like MySpace and Fox Sports.
“There’s a unique creative approach that online needs to take because it’s a different medium,” said Gordon Paddison, executive vice president for new media marketing at New Line, which is owned by Time Warner Inc.At less than 5 percent of online ad spending, Internet commercials are still a small piece of that pie, but advertising executives say they expect them to become far more prominent this year. Advertisers spent $410 million buying space for video ads online last year, up from $225 million in 2005. They will probably spend more than $700 million this year, according to eMarketer, an online advertising research firm.
“The Number 23” Internet commercials are rooted in experiential marketing, an increasingly popular tactic in the real world that has marketing teams trying to generate attention on the ground with product samples or events. New Line Cinema hired street teams to go to 80 bars or events like the Super Bowl across the country with a confession booth and a video camera.
Visitors to the booth can obscure their faces and do not have to say their names as they describe their obsessions to the camera. There may be a delay of up to several minutes between when the footage is shot and when Internet users see it. Local Internet traffic can make streaming video arrive more slowly, and some dull or inappropriate content may be removed.
New Line bought banner ads around the Internet and streamed footage live from the booth at the Rhino Bar. When Web surfers open pages with the New Line ads, they first see a short message from Mr. Carrey, then are taken to the most current footage from the bar. Editors from Foglight Entertainment, a video production company, are sitting on the second floor of the Rhino Bar tonight editing rough footage on the fly.
The live confessions are also being posted on a YouTube channel dedicated to the movie.
Advertisers and publishers are currently sorting out how to measure video ads and how much they should cost. They are selling for much higher prices now than text-based ads on the Internet, and the trend is to measure based on an “interaction rate” that focuses on time spent watching an ad or using tools in it rather than a click-through rate that measures how many people visit a company’s Web site as a result of an ad, said Chris Young, executive vice president for rich media at DoubleClick, the company that created and served the New Line ads.
Online video is possible on a large scale because broadband Internet connections are now in more than half of American households. This is the closest the Internet has come yet in replicating television. Many of the largest advertisers on TV and in print publications have been slow to move much of their ad spending online, but ad executives said online video may change that.
“Big marketers are excited about video because it’s a very familiar format,” said John Paulson, president of G2 Interactive, the digital marketing arm of the Grey Group of Companies, in the WPP Group. “Moving picture, sight and sound are more familiar. It doesn’t feel as foreign to them as in the old days of a banner ad or Web site content.”
But familiarity has misled many marketers into simply repurposing their TV spots to use online, which ad executives say is a mistake in the longer run. Web surfers would want shorter, more interactive ads, and online commercials would ultimately work best when they merge the interactive, user-involvement aspects of the Internet with traditional video, executives say.
Already, some marketers are experimenting with that approach. In November, Levi’s Internet commercials showed young people at holiday parties wearing Levi’s jeans. There were clearly marked spots in the video that viewers could scroll over to see demonstrations of the jeans.
In a banner ad for “The Prestige,” a Disney movie, last fall, Web surfers could scroll through local movie theater listings in the ad while they watched a movie trailer. That ad was developed by DoubleClick, but online ad companies like PointRoll, which is owned by the Gannett Company, have similar products. VideoEgg, an online video network, is selling scrolling ads at the bottom of videos that invite viewers to click on them to see more.
Media companies are rapidly increasing the videos they post online featuring popular TV shows as well as original Internet video, and they are selling ads to run with that content. Video in display ads may provide new revenue to the digital units of media companies, said Randall Rothenberg, chief executive of the Internet Advertising Bureau, an association for interactive publishers.
Many of the advertisers showing online commercials with Fox’s online videos are paying for the airtime from their TV budgets, said Michael Barrett, chief revenue officer for Fox Interactive Media.
“We’re seeing tremendous demand from marketers,” Mr. Barrett said. “The demand from advertisers is outstripping our supply of video.”
If all goes smoothly at the Rhino Bar, New Line is considering beaming footage into banner ads from its confession booth at Comic-Con, a comic book convention in New York, on Feb. 23, the day the movie opens.
