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Eyeblasters hit Irish Web sites
Friday, October 26 2001
by Andrew McLindon


Some of Ireland's leading Web sites have this week started to run an on-line ad
format that has not been used in this country before. 

The handful of sites, including Unison.ie, Examiner.ie and
EntertainmentIreland.ie, are running an ad from Eircom that delivers a full-page
cartoon-like Halloween greeting on their home pages when they load. The ad, which
is called an "eyeblaster," appears for around five seconds and once it is
finished a pop-up ad for Halloween themed e-cards appears in the corner of the
page. 

 

According to Colin Joyce, director of Adculture, the company that developed the
eyeblaster for Eircom, such ads are here to stay. "It is a unique format that
allows you to capture an audience's attention because it is 'in your face'
advertising. It is particularly good for branding and product launches," he
commented. 

Joyce told ElectricNews.Net that several of the company's clients were looking at
using the format in the near future and that early results from the Eircom ad had
been "extremely good."

Simon Ferguson, managing director of the on-line advertising network Sales
Online, said that while these kind of ads were innovative, they might not become
commonplace. "Eyeblasters certainly show just what can be done with the on-line
ad format and we helped place them on some of the sites, but I think that people
might become annoyed with them quite quickly and they could lose their impact if
they started to appear on a large number of sites," he remarked. 

One of the supposed advantages of the eyeblasters is that they are designed to
only appear once on a visitor's screen in a 24-hour period no matter how many
times that person visits a site with such an ad. This did not appear to be the
case when ElectricNews.Net visited Unison.ie, but it did occur with
EntertainmentIreland.ie. 

It is unlikely that such ads will be a flash-in-the-pan. According to the
US-based Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), recent studies have shown that
these kinds of larger on-lines ads, known as Interactive Marketing Units (IMUs),
are beginning to prove popular among advertisers. 

The IAB said that surveys commissioned by MSN and DoubleClick found that IMUs
improved "key branding metrics" by 40 percent on average. "Rather than
saying bigger is better, I like to say that the new IMUs are working," remarked
the organisation's president and chief executive officer, Robin Webster. 

But, such ads are not without their detractors. Martha Stone, co-director of the
Online News Association's ethical standards initiative, told a conference
recently that these ads might be inappropriate on news-led Web sites.

At the NetMedia 2001 conference in London earlier this year, Stone said that the
ads were undoubtedly innovative, but she questioned whether readers would
appreciate them appearing over editorial content covering matters such as planes
crashes or natural disasters. According to Stone, both The New York Times and the
Wall Street Journal have refused to run such ads. 

Simon Ferguson, however, defended the ads. "They only appear for five seconds
and you can still read the text underneath them, so I don't think they are overly
intrusive," he said.