"Interstitials: The "Perfect" Advertising Vehicle?"

Television advertisers are confounded by viewers who get up and go to the kitchen instead of watching their commercials. Print advertisers face competition from editorial (not to mention other advertisers). Even Web banners must contend for attention with other elements on the page which may be of far greater interest to viewers.

By way of contrast, imagine an advertising vehicle that has absolutely no competition (not even from other ads) and appears when viewers have little choice but to watch it. Such a vehicle is the Web insterstitial (also called intermercial).

An interstitial is a small application that presents an ad while the rest of a web page is loading. Once the page is complete, the interstitial goes away. Meanwhile, the ad has high visibility with a truly captive audience: the legions of web users who connect via modems with speeds of 56 Kbps or slower and spend much of their time staring at the computer screen during the "world wide wait."

At present, interstitials represent only a fraction of Web advertising expenditures. But according to a recent survey by Jupiter Communications, interstitials will account for 25% of all Web ad revenues by 2001. By comparison, the share of banner advertising will decline from 80% today to 50% in 2001.

Sponsors love interstitials, but some webmasters have objections simply because they are so intrusive. On the other hand, they make practical use of what truly is dead time while other content is loading. Marleen McDaniel, CEO of Women's Wire, finds interstitials "annoying" and permits them when a user first logs on but not as she moves from page to page within the site.

If you want to check out a site which plays lots of interstitials so you can form your own opinion, Microsoft Network (www.msn.com) features examples for such advertisers as Toyota, Toshiba and SAP. Another site to look at is Condйnet (www.condenet.com), which features content from such Condй Nast publications as Gourmet and GQ. Condйnet developed its own version of interstitials especially for Proctor & Gamble, and now plays them for various advertisers throughout the site. Called "pop-up windows," these are small Java-scripted interstitials that accompany regular banner ads for the same product and disappear after five seconds. According to Condйnet, clickthroughs are three times higher for these than for traditional banner ads.

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