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American Morning

Internet Advertising is Changing

Aired July 10, 2001 - 09:27   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BRIAN NELSON, CNN ANCHOR: Now, Internet advertising is also changing and advertisers are pushing the envelope, as it were, the wake of a dot-com explosion.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NELSON (voice-over): Remember those early days of TV? Black- and-white ads were, at times, painfully plain, the music, not much better, bordering on adult nursery rhymes. Well, viewers said, so what, TV is free!

Well, much the same story today on the Internet. The Web sites we visit are free because advertisers fund them and in return, they hope we'll notice their ads. But when advertising dollars dried up during the dot-com implosion last year, many sites died, and the survivors had to innovate.

And Yahoo!, one of the Web's biggest survivors, led the way this spring. It teamed up with an Internet design agency called Onemedia (ph) and they created a successful series of test-bed ads that were engaging, interactive, and pushed the artistic envelope.

LUANNE CALVERT, MEDIA DIRECTOR YAHOO: When we've shown the ads that are available to people in advertising agencies and to creative people, the reaction has been, oh my gosh, I didn't know that you could do this on the Internet.

NELSON: Other ads in this new generation act as tripwires and explode, sort of.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I roll over it and the ad expands and it's really like a microweb (ph) site within the banner ad.

NELSON: The now-maligned banner ad is growing up, too. It's mushrooming into a larger and more noticeable rectangle and into something called a skyscraper.

Another newcomer is the sometimes annoying pop-up ad that loads while you're visiting a page and then hangs around after you've moved on. So far, they're not winning universal acceptance.

MICHAEL KOZIOL, CEO, ANT FARM INTERACTIVE: Because you're so eager to get rid of these ads and just click them to make them go away, you rarely remember who the advertiser was. NELSON (on camera): So do these new ads work? Are they succeeding in drawing in new eyeballs? It's still too early to say, but the Internet community is pretty confident they will.

(voice-over): In fact, BMW coughed up an estimated $3 million to put Madonna into the back of one of its cars for a five-minute entertainment ad. That kind of investment is what Internet dot-coms and advertisers are hoping is a sign of things to come.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

NELSON: All right, Ann, let's give you the last word.

ANN KELLAN, CNN SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT: Well, advertisers do have to worry, according to this survey, about people being tracked online. They - people...

NELSON: That is a (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

KELLAN: ... talked about - yes, they didn't like that too much.

NELSON: OK, Ann Kellan, thank you very much.

Now let's go back to Daryn at the desk - Daryn.

KAGAN: Brian, thank you so much.

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