New Video Commercial Launched For Online Advertisers
The line between television and internet advertising has been further blurred by the launch of a new format that allows marketers to create full-screen, broadcast quality commercials online.
The 30-second video commercials, created by advertising software firm Unicast, exhibit a television-like quality that allows advertisers to create fully interactive campaigns using their offline creative assets.
The new 2 megabyte format plays up to eight times faster than traditional broadband video and is fully downloadable via its pre-cached delivery method. This means that ads play transitionally and without delay when consumers are moving between pages.
A number of high-profile brands, including Pepsi, Warner Brothers, Honda and McDonald’s, have been secured to take part in a six week pre-paid beta trial of the new format, which will see the video commercials appear across a range of websites.
Commenting on the initiative, Richard Hopple, Unicast chairman and chief operating officer, said: “Increasingly, advertisers are using video and sound online in an attempt to make their internet advertising more effective and television-like.”
Elise Brahmer, media supervisor at RPA, the agency that works for Honda, added: “The video commercial will be a powerful catalyst for traditional advertisers who, in the past, were not comfortable spending significant amounts on the internet.”
The new format could prove an attractive proposition for marketers and Jean Paul Edwards, head of new media at Manning Gottlieb OMD, believes the video commercial is a sign of things to come for online advertisers.
He said: “This is another sign of the general convergence between PC/internet and television. This new format will no doubt be a potential tool to allow greater integration between the two media as television becomes more interactive and the internet becomes more audio visual.”
It is expected that the new video commercial will tempt more brands online and help drive further growth in the sector, which saw adspend top £151 million in the first half of last year, giving it a record 2% share of the overall market (see Figures Show Online Advertising Boom In 2003).
Earlier this month research from Dynamic Logic revealed that interactive internet advertising is more successful than traditional online methods when it comes to generating brand awareness and intention to purchase (see Interactive Online Ads Outperform Traditional Methods).
Unicast: www.unicast.com
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