"Life is interactive, so your advertising should be too," said Bullseye Art CEO Josh Kimberg referring to an emerging trend among Internet advertisers to push the interactive envelope. Two years ago Kimberg and his cyber cronies set up the multi-media shop Bullseye Art, New York, to bring interactive animation to the Web. After years of banging on clients’ doors to sing the praises of using Macromedia’s Flash and Shockwave to create ads for the Internet, advertisers are starting to turn an interested ear to Kimberg’s mantra.
"For two years I have been preaching to people, telling them that we had to build part of their Website in Flash so that people who had the bandwidth could see something interesting. Clients were hanging up on me and wouldn’t take my phone calls. Now all of a sudden everyone is like, ‘So there’s going to be a Flash version, right?’ " said 23-year-old Kimberg, satisfied by the turnaround.
Both Bullseye Art and New York-based Rotomedia, an online advertising agency, are pioneering new ways of advertising on the Internet to move beyond the capabilities of an HTML-based rotating ad banner. "Even in an industry that is only three years old, HTML banners have already become ‘traditional.’ Flash banners is the way advertising is going to happen on the Web. It’s the next trend," asserted Kimberg.
Backing up that theory, Rotomedia president Josh Stylman estimated that the average click-through rate for an HTML ad banner is less than one percent whereas the click-through rate for something done in Flash or Shockwave can be up to 20 times higher. While there are many variables involved, Bullseye couldn’t ignore the fact that a highly interactive advertisement drew more interest. Last summer they set out to see how far they could go.
Bullseye created an interactive mini-soap opera about a fictional school dubbed Crater Valley University (found at www. cratervalley.com). Knowing they needed sponsorship for the site but wanting it to be free of banner ads, Bullseye decided to embed the advertising in the site’s environment and got JanSport, BarnesAndNoble.Com and Condom Country to sign on to the project. As you navigate the site, the campus bookstore connects you to BarnesandNoble.com. When you click on the little fairy that flutters protectively over the campus talking about safe sex, she becomes a link to www.condom.com, or Condom Country.
"We did it for the advertising model but we still don’t have the data to sell it the way that people running click-through programs can show what kind of revenue it will generate. The whole thing is still in its infancy," said Kimberg.
While embedded advertising remains widely unresearched in the interactive world, both Kimberg and Stylman envision expanding on the banner ad concept with Flash and Shockwave so that an ad can function as a video game or a cartoon with the product embedded in the entertainment. SonicNet, a music Website, is already using Flash advertising with something they’re calling Flash Radio, powered by Macromedia Shockrave. A person can click on Flash Radio and listen to whatever music genre they choose, but before a song is played, a brief ad sounds from Pentium III, who sponsors the site.
Another of Bullseye’s initiatives came earlier this year with a promotional video game it created for BuyItOnline.com called Shoppin’ Frenzy. The player guides the protagonist "Bucky" through a cyber shopping mall, trying to find hidden gift boxes while avoiding stressful situations. Depending on how many gifts a player adds to the gift basket, he or she is awarded coupons that can be redeemed for items purchased on BuyItOnline.com. To promote the game, BuyItOnline gave out 3 million "super-coups" in shopping malls on the East Coast. "We basically turned a video game into a coupon," said Kimberg. While the approach was different to what Bullseye tried with Crater Valley, Kimberg wanted to explore different ways to push interactivity in advertising.
For now, advertising on the Web is still somewhat limited to HTML because most users’ browsers only support HTML. But as Flash and Shockwave become more common (AOL 4.0 now ships both versions with its upgrade) and bandwidth becomes less of an issue, the possibilities for advertising stand to be blown wide open.
"The banner ad is the one standard in the industry that everyone has agreed upon but it’s not the answer to what advertisers need; it’s just one piece of the puzzle," concluded Stylman.
