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Web Advertising's Newest Tool: Your Cursor Comet Systems claims that its customizable pointer increases click-through rates by 97% 
Until mid-May, if you run across a banner ad for the yellow pages Web site of Southeastern regional phone company Bell South Corp. you may get a peek at the latest experiment in making Net advertising more effective. Your plain old mouse cursor will turn into a postage-stamp-size version of the "walking fingers" logo of Bell South's yellow pages -- but only if you've already invested about 10 seconds to download a piece of software that plugs into the Web browser of any PC that runs Microsoft's Windows operating system. If you drag your cursor near the ad, the fingers will even start to walk (as in "let your fingers do the walking," Bell South's yellow pages slogan). Your cursor will return to normal if you click to a screen without a Bell South ad -- or even if the ad no longer appears on the screen you're viewing.
The plug-in, from a New York-based company called Comet Systems Inc., is an effort to develop one of the prime pieces of real estate on the Web into a moneymaker. It marks "the launch of cursor advertising," declares Comet CEO Dean Margolis, and not just by turning your mouse arrow into a traveling billboard. Margolis argues that the antics his corpulant cursor can perform will significantly boost the share of visitors who click on related ad banners, to well above the normal 1%. Melissa Honabach, senior manager of advertising and promotions for Bell South IntelliVentures, the phone company's publishing arm, says if the transformed cursor leads to higher click-throughs, Bell South may use it as well for both its white pages Web site and its corporate site. "It's a clever concept, and it isn't as intrusive as an entire banner ad popping up," says Honabach says. 15 MILLION DOWNLOADS. Margolis says Comet's cursor technology is live on 10,000 sites, 300 of which are licensees paying up to $3,000 a month. The rest are smaller sites that either get the technology in exchange for advertising space or that download stock cursors from Comet's Web site at www.LiveCursors.com. Margolis also claims that 15 million Web surfers have downloaded his plug-in. Comet charges advertisers that use its cursor $2 per thousand impressions (CPM) -- defined as one ad being viewed once. Add this to the $1 per CPM Bell South pays Flycast Network to serve the related banners, and for an extra $3 per CPM, the phone company gets a chance to roughly double click-throughs on its banner ads. In tests, the Comet cursor has increased click-through rates by 97% and more than doubled brand recall. A study by marketer Millward Brown also claims that the unusual cursor increases banner-ad awareness tenfold. Its two-month study surveyed 14,000 Web surfers who used an altered cursor on sites such as FortuneCity, GameSpot, Lycos, NBC, and Women.com. "It's intuitive that advertising through the cursor would get attention, but we wanted to back it up with hard numbers," Margolis says of the study, which was sponsored by Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, MasterCard, and Cendant. None of the study sponsors has yet signed up to use the Comet cursor, though Margolis hints that several may soon. Jim Nail, a Forrester Research analyst, is skeptical nonetheless. "I suspect that the first few times consumers run across it, they'll find it entertaining and appealing," he says. "But [a changing cursor] will lose its appeal if it becomes too common. Too much of it can be confusing and annoying, especially if it's hard to find a hyperlink" while using an ad icon instead of an arrow. Nail concedes that a changing cursor might draw attention from viewers who have subconsciously trained themselves to not look at the spots where banners usually appear. But "a changing cursor is not as substantial as putting your ad in the right place to begin with," he adds. "If advertisers don't put their ad in editorial contexts that are compatible with the product, a cursor won't save it." TWEETY BIRD. So far, Comet has most successfully marketed its technology to entertainment sites. Warner Bros., for instance, is using the cursor on its film, TV, and cartoon sites. The cursor of a surfer who has downloaded the plug-in will morph from Tweety Bird to Fred Flintstone, depending on the context. Other sites that feature the technology include Comedy Central, Sony Music, Universal Studios, Mattel's Cabbage Patch Kids, Ty Toys' Beanie Babies, and Tiger Toys Furby. Comet won't release details of its financial results, and Forrester's Nail doubts that the cursor alone can make a successful company. Margolis agrees -- and says the company is working on developing more uses for the cursor in the areas of E-commerce and gaming. He says he also plans partner with Internet service providers and with hardware and software distributors. Some 25 of the company's 40 employees are working on marketing, distribution, or promotion of the cursor, according to marketing director Ben Austin. The Comet cursor isn't likely to fail from lack of exposure. Rather, the question is whether, once they've seen it, viewers will really really love it. By Stefani Eads in New York
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