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Expandable Banners
UK-Netmarketing Weekly Round-up - June 01, 2001

Does the announcement last month that the Interactive Advertising Bureau was endorsing a number of new shapes and sizes for banner adverts herald a new golden era for banners or is it a medium in its death throes? The announcement came hot on the heels of US new media stalwarts C|Net adopting these standards, presumably to try and stem the decline in online advertising revenues.

The number of advertising formats for banners is certainly on the increase, fuelled by the need to increase revenues and brands looking for innovative ways to gain more media space bang for their buck. Nikki Berry asked about a new format she came across, "Can anyone shed any light on a new banner format that I've just heard about - 'expandable banners'? Apparently they look like normal 468 x 60s but when clicked on, expand to fill or partly fill the web page and can therefore contain much more information? Is anyone working with this technology?"

Damian Burns suggested, "The banner technology for this type of creative execution is available from Enliven amongst others."

Nikki Pilkington added, "I've seen these on Geocities sites - when you click on the arrows, they expand to give bigger ads - still bloody annoying pop-ups though!!"

Edward Flower shared his experience of using these banners, "You need to talk to Enliven who provide the technology being it. The banner is a 468x60 and is served through a third party server as normal if you so wish. The rest of the banner is server from yours or your client server and is quite easy to do. There are loads of examples of companies in the UK that have used the technology as its been around for a while. You may also want to look at Point n Roll banners as these are really good as well."

Sean Dillon continued, "It's another use of 'rich media' served into the banner space, it may or may not include Flash/Java etc... It may just be expanding div/layers (it is not a proprietary technology such as Unicast's Superstitials). I seem to recall some large campaigns knocking around about 2/3 months ago for FT.com.

Enliven (they have one on their front page www.enliven.com) and Bluestreak seem to have made some in roads in producing some ads but my view is that this is just a concept to take the ad out of the banner space, as such any good developer/coder will be able to produce something for you given the right spec."

Dug Falby, shared the view with some other these new formats and technologies may not be an entirely positive thing, writing, "*Ouch* am I the only Internet communicator on this list to think this sounds like a nightmare. The last thing we need are expandable banners, why not just have banner technology that redirects the visitor to an all-advert page so he never has to bother with the page he wanted to see in the first place. Alternatively, we could all just stop using our browsers altogether and you could just drop loads of adds in our inbox ;-)

But seriously, you *can* deliver code to browsers that will run under certain conditions (JavaScript, when JavaScript is enabled for instance) and - if you're feeling particularly malevolent - the wintel platform has a whole family of security holes which will let you do pretty much anything you like with the machine..."

Fiona Campbell-Howes agreed, "Whoever is responsible for the type of ad (don't know the technical term for it) that scrolls down the page as you scroll down, I hate you. I have seen - and been severely irritated by - one for IBM on the FT.com site. Please, please, whoever you are, don't make any more!"

Jason Dale shared an example that got under his skin, "Currently worse than pop ups are the Persil green UFOs that follow your mouse around until you bung them in the washing machine and get rid of them (see http://www.channel4.com/play/ for an example)...It might be creative and different, but it's a real bloomin' nuisance for the user! There's one place I'd love to stick them, unfortunately that option isn't available!!"

Sally Krumholz provided a useful round-up of the existing technologies for delivering rich media or expandable banners:

Blue Streak - a proprietary tool & the only expandable banner that works with AOL
Pointroll - a new simple non-java based tool. I believe it relies upon JavaScript and is gaining acceptance on publisher sites
Enliven offers both macromedia Flash & Director based solutions. However I should note that given new specs from IAB and some gains in flash based banners amongst publisher sites, you may want to consider those options as well."

James Wardell added, "MSN seem to be offering expanding banners. They give you the code, too, if you're interested. With theirs, all you have to do is hover over the banner, and it drops down to fill the page."

Clearly there are already a plethora of formats, and the number is only likely to increase as publisher's aim to offer more variety to advertisers. Time will tell which formats, if any, will survive. One thing is for sure, the drive to find other revenue streams will continue while advertising continues to be slow. The number of publishers that are closing or shrinking their online efforts may also help by reducing the complexity for media planner/buyers.

The Start of the Dotcom Recovery

Since the doom and gloom started at the tail end of last year, the number of positive dotcom stories have been few and far between. So when, QXL Ricardo's shares leapt up last week, Ray Taylor wondered whether it might be the start of something, writing, "QXL Ricardo shares leap up to 10.75 (3.00pm Fri May 25) from 6.75 this morning on the strength of an announcement of a strategic deal with Microsoft, and year end results that the company believes puts them on the muddy dirt track to being within sniffing distance of the neighbourhood of near-profitability. Is this the start of dotcom recovery?"

Adrian Moss replied, "I hope so. I am pleased to say that last month we went into profitability in a marketplace that everyone has been saying is in the doldrums. Excessive negativity leads to problems of confidence that are unfounded(like too much optimism not so long ago) There is an argument that the image of Internet 'boom' and unrealised hype created the poor confidence levels now that are equally false."

Chris Heathcoate added, "No. The fact that investors are *still* causing Internet stocks to fluctuate wildly is bad. We don't want boom-and-bust, we want steady sustainable growth."

Barry Mills thought along the same lines as Ray, writing, "Not really Ray. The main drive behind the price jump was the announcement that they are cutting back their Euro-domination ambitions to concentrate on scraping a profit out of the user-base they already have (my interpretation of what they said), and that they have funds in place to achieve this. Even with the lowering of sights, they still don't expect to hit profitability until 2003, and their shares duly 'leapt' to 98.5% below their peak."

Ray Taylor responded, "Good point! Sounds like a sensible plan to me. But my question was, of course, rhetorical. Even more interesting, that people still insist on comparing dotcoms health with the peak of investor madness last year. Who cares what the share price of any dotcom was 18 months ago? Fortunes have been lost - that was last century. Anyone who invested in QXL at 5.5p and sold last week at 11p made 100% profit. Whether the dotcom old-guard like QXL and Lastminute.com can get their act together in the long run remains to be seen.

But - as I am sure I have said many times before - we are closer to market normality now, than we were in early 2000. True, the immediate post-boom effect was to depress the market, but when the market 'recovers' (if that's what you want to call it) it will do so at a level that is comparable more to current levels than to those of the dotcom nirvana of yesteryear. So it is possible that any recovery will go unnoticed. And may even be held back several months, if not years, by lack of will from this industry."

Given the recent announcements by Tiscali (shedding 50% of its UK workforce) and Atom Films closing it's overseas operations, it still feels like there is plenty of 'market correction' yet to come. Scratching under the surface there are positive stories, but perhaps the British media's fascination with the boom and bust is keeping these stories out of the limelight for the time being.

Personalising Emails Using Outlook

Every so often uk-netmarketing throws up a discussion, with some very practical advice. Adam Dean provided some help for subscribers by asking, "If I was doing a conventional mail shot I would do a mail merge of my database so each letter was personalised. I would like to be able to do this in Outlook so the e-mail address of the specific person appears in the 'To' field and I have a merge field in the body of the text: Dear <First_Name> for example. Could anybody advise me on how to do this or point me in the direction of some websites that may be able to help."

Since this is the way many people take their first steps with email marketing and it's not always as simple as it might seems, some pointers are always handy. Stephen Pratley replied, "Same as for the conventional mailer. If you're using something like MS Word, go through the same process as normal, but there should be an option to merge the files to an email rather than to a letter."

On the downside, this method allows you to mail merge emails, but unfortunately does nothing to manage the results. As Stephen pointed out, "Be prepared for a ton of crap coming back into your inbox though. Out of office replies, bounced addresses, etc. Also you won't have any way of tracking the success of the campaign, managing people who want taking off your list...Generally speaking it'll be a nightmare. I did this for a dissertation a few years ago and it made me realise how much a proper system does."

David Simpson provided some more pointers, "If you promise you're not going to start spamming I can tell you that Office XP offers 'E-mail messages' as a document type when you do a mail merge. I don't know if previous versions of Office offered this. It's pretty easy just start a mail merge in Word as you would usually and follow the prompts."

Using Outlook and mail merge for an email campaign is a useful way for getting a handle on email campaigns, but it's worth bearing in mind there's a lot more to managing a campaign than just sending out the emails, which is illustrated by the number of companies providing help with email marketing covering everything from strategy to technical solutions.

LINKS OF NOTE:
A quick round up of interesting, funny, useful and other links gleaned from the uk-netmarketing list, office gossip and other nefarious sources...we take no responsibility should you chose to click...basically, it's not our fault. Enjoy:

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