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Bharat Kumar

Some players are trying out the `site capture' model of online advertising, wherein the ad takes over the entire screen for a brief spell. So, how true is free choice on the Internet as against the TV? But for now, not everybody wants to sell this way, all the time.

IT'S easy to guess why Badri Seshadri smiles more often now than he did, when we met him last June. His site, cricinfo.com, may see operational break-even sometime in April-May this year. He says that is good, considering it misses the initial deadline by only a month or two.

And one of the things he feels may just give that impetus to the journey to profits, is a different advertisement model.

For the recently concluded India-England, cricket series, Cricinfo used the ``site capture model'' to convey advertisers' messages to viewers. And the results? About eight times as many click-throughs to the advertiser's site as compared to the usual advertisement, that stays on a Web page and which the surfer may choose to avoid. (A click-through takes place when a surfer looks at an advertisement and clicks on it, and is then taken to the advertiser's site.) Here's how the model works: When you click on a particular link in a Web page, instead of going directly to that link, your screen is taken over by an advertisement. It lasts between seven and 10 seconds. Once the advertisement gets over, the site automatically takes you to the page you requested last.

Says Seshadri, ``A typical advertisement that resides on a page and which the surfer may choose not to click on, gave us about 1000 click-throughs. The site capture model gave us about 8,000 click-throughs.'' This must also mean that the company gets a premium for such advertisements. Seshadri says, ``We have just started experimenting with this model. We are two months old at this exercise. Once this gains general acceptance, we should be able to charge about four times as much as we do now.''

The site capture model is not new now.

Ford, for one of its launches, teamed up with Yahoo! Early last calendar year, to capture the attention of the latter's viewership. The message here is: if you want a powerful message conveyed to a mass market, the site capture model can be used effectively. This compares somewhat with Super Bowl advertisements that command a hefty premium and capture a large number of eyeballs.

According to Seshadri, ``The model has to be worked out carefully in the case of Cricinfo, a portal that is not general and caters to specific interests. We can run such an advertisement only on days when there is a one-day international or on one of the five days of a Test Match when the day promises to be interesting.''

Mixed reaction

How are Net surfers taking to such advertisements? Aren't they peeved when their activity is taken over by an advertisement that they can do without? Says Seshadri, ``In the Indian geography, people seem to have welcomed this. They seem to be intrigued by something new or innovative.'' But, in the US, the audience is less than kind to such advertisers. Says Seshadri, ``A client of ours had a tough time handling negative feedback mail in the US. Its US office actually requested that the Indian campaign — targeting NRIs — be stopped.'' Catchy, but once is enough. Intel had tried a similar advertising campaign, on Zdnetindia.com in June last year. According to Prakash Bagri, Business Marketing Manager at Intel India, ``we wanted to spread the message for the macro-processing concept. For this campaign, we used the site capture model.'' Did it try the model out for any of its other campaigns? No, says, Bagri. ``I am not sure if we will do this again. This is not to say that the campaign was not effective. It was. In terms of click-throughs, we got about 100-150 times more clickthroughs than we would have using the average Web page advertisement. The industry norm till then was that between 0.2 and 0.5 per cent of viewers actually click through.''

Bagri says that there is no static, sure-fire way of getting through to the consumer, and that the exercise didn't prove that site take-over is the best way to capture an audience's attention, but merely initiated the exercise of being creative. According to him, ``On the Internet, the longevity of a concept is low compared to other media. What was innovative six months ago, is de rigueur today. For instance, we tried out a similar model sometime after our first site capture campaign.

The response was definitely less than it was for our first campaign. So we need to consistently innovate to rein in the viewer.'' Seshadri too is wary of this and admits that what is intriguing today may turn annoying tomorrow. He says, ``We certainly cannot over-do this. So we try to be creative. For instance, for the final one-day international between England and India, instead of an entire site-takeover, we had an advertisement where an electronic eraser appears on the screen, erases the matter in the middle of the screen, conveys a message and then disappears, making the original content re-appear. For this too, we have had good response. So, creativity is the name of the game.''

Creativity is all right, but don't such advertisement models turn the myth — that Net surfers can choose what they want to view — on the head?

For, if surfers are forced to watch these advertisements, then it is no different from the television medium.

Maulik Jasubhai, Director, Jasubhai Group, on whose portal Zdnetindia, Intel conducted its ad campaign, does not agree. ``The user has a choice of clicking the ad to stop it at any time. But the experience had been that people wait for the advertisement to finish rather than clicking it in between.''

This model has since evolved into a more non-intrusive format. Primarily with the use of transparent flash the ad unit expands to 468 X 400 pixel size from the original 468 x 60 pixel size in case of a top banner advertisement or from 728X90 pixel size to 728 X 600 pixel size in case of a leader board advertisement unit. The user is free to expand and collapse the banner. So, this kind of ad does not turn the myth over. People will always have a choice to react to ads on the Internet. It is an interactive medium. That's why you see evolution in the model itself: because of users' interaction with the ad unit.

Despite the choice that viewers had to switch the ad off, says Jasubhai, ``the click-through rates were 9 per cent of total viewership as compared to about 0.5 per cent for pixel ads.''

But given that intrigue lasts only so long before a seemingly creative idea becomes a liability with consumers, how long will Web sites stretch the site-capture model? Says, Jasubhai, ``We have not carried the site capture model with any other advertisers. But in its evolved form, it has become an asset for the clients, users and publishers. Also, there are very few takers for the site capture in India, especially for our domain. This is a premium advertising option which very few clients can afford.''

bharatk@thehindu.co.in

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