Online Ads: Will Fewer, but Bigger, Be Better?

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At least one agency head, albeit provided as a reference by the OPA, says the new ad formats look promising. "This will help to reduce clutter and to some extent prevent the Web from becoming a direct-response junkyard," says Andreas Combuechen, CEO and chief creative officer of Atmosphere BBDO, the digital agency of agency giant BBDO. "Search has taken a lot of the attention. The industry needs something new to get reinvigorated."

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group made up of publishers, portals, ad networks, and others, also said it welcomes new ad formats that allow for more creative ads. "It's a great step," says Sherrill Mane, senior vice-president for industry service at the IAB, which among other things sets online ad unit guidelines.

New Formats Face Hurdles

Still, the formats face a number of challenges. For one, they take over more of the screen, and in a potentially interruptive way for the user. If they annoy more than they engage, such ads could backfire.

Perhaps even more important, marketers hesitate to use ad formats unless they're widely adopted. The fact that so many premium online publishers are promising to offer them does help. "That sounds like critical mass," says Andy Atherton, chief operating officer at Brand.net, an ad network devoted to brand ads.

But because wide use matters, some ad industry leaders question the wisdom of limiting the formats to sale by just the OPA's publishers, which could slow adoption as an industrywide standard. And despite recent talk among some online publishers about how standard online ad formats have helped ad networks make commodities out of ad space, standardization ultimately is key. Advertisers and agencies simply don't have the resources to do even more versions of ads for the same campaigns, since they're already spreading those resources across traditional media, Web sites, social networks, and mobile devices.

In any case, the ads will have to show rapid and measurable success to catch on widely. Just how that success will be measured remains unclear. OPA President Pam Horan says publishers hope to use traditional brand-awareness measures, though the association isn't yet specifying what those will be. Marketers, who have grown accustomed to measuring results increasingly with clicks, will want to know before they go whole hog for the ads.

Distinction for Premium Publishers?

Nisenholtz at the New York Times clearly views the ads as something that will set premium publishers apart from other sites. "The whole purpose of this is to map the quality of the creative [ad] to the quality of the sites," he says. "Part of the problem is that much of the Web is a sewer."

While a lot of people rightfully would argue that what's a sewer is in the eye of the beholder, Nisenholtz's brush-off of the rest of the Web doesn't negate the larger point: There's a burning need for new forms of online advertising that go beyond the click to give advertisers more flexible, creative ways to engage with potential customers. If the OPA's formats work, that will help publishers, advertisers, and users alike.

The only mystery is why the industry hasn't done this sooner. It's probably because online advertising was growing fast enough until recently that few sites needed to. But with the second dot-com bust looming ahead, they do now.

Hof is BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau chief.