Sizzle: OPA Ad Units

Posted by Darren on Jun 30, 2009 • (Comments)

The Online Publishers Association has created three new ad units that rolled out this morning.  These units include:

  • The Fixed Panel: 336 wide x 700 tall, remains constant as the user scrolls to the top and bottom of the page
  • The XXL Box: 468 wide x 648 tall, opens for seven seconds to 936 wide x 648 tall with 1/24x frequency
  • The Pushdown: 970 wide x 418 tall, opens to display the advertisement and then after seven seconds rolls up to 970 wide x 66 tall, with 1/24x frequency.

It’s only fitting that these ads rolled out approximately 1 week after the OPA released their study, “Online Publishers Association Study Shows Consumers Exposed to Display Advertising Are More Engaged and Spend More Money Online.”

These ad units will have immediate impact on proxies such as click-thru rate (I think this will be most affected) and interaction rate (similar to Rich Media numbers).  I predict that we’re going to hear some very positive news comparing these units to traditional IAB standard display banners within the next week or two.

I’m excited that publishers are coming together and creating new units and by banding together, helps advertisers give scale to their campaigns.  Some early adopters of these units are:

  • Bank of America will run the Pushdown on CNN.com and Time.com
  • Cleveland Clinic will run the Fixed Panel on NYTimes.com
  • CNA is running the Pushdown on Bizjournals.com
  • Frito-Lay ran the Pushdown on Discovery’s PlanetGreen.com in the second quarter of 2009
  • Mercedes-Benz will run various OPA units on FOXSports.com, msnbc.com, NYTimes.com, Reuters.com, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post

Lets keep this in mind when evaluating the OPA units:

  • They are new and intrusive, so user engaged metrics are going to be high, especially at first
  • Take advantage of the canvas, don’t just resize a 300X250 for the sake of making it bigger.  Be interactive.
  • Does the cost of running these units map to performance?  I’m guessing the performance is going to be extremely high at first, but over time, evaluate.
  • Because these ads are so large, it’s more important than ever that they are extremely relevant to the individual viewing them.
  • The “piss-off” factor with these units could will be high.  Please keep this in mind and use your creative strategically here.

I’m going to get really excited about these units when they can be bought/sold on exchanges so that I can map my own audiences and data to them, eliminating the “piss-off” factor.  While these units have sizzle for eye-catching size and sexyness, these don’t help me reach a very specific audience, as these are currently only 2 dimensional (creative + media).  Audiences isn’t just site aggregated, it’s much more refined than that.  More on the 3rd dimension in coming days.

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , + Categorized as Advertising & Marketing, Internet & Web X.0
  • Michael Senno
    I am on board with the innovation, and the fact that the OPA is continuing to tweak in hopes of improving improving, but a few questions. If you're a site planning to deploy new inventory, possibly you're more valuable inventory, why not sell direct. I feel the overuse of exchanges are hurting the economics online.

    I'm not intimately familiar with all the new guidelines, however I think a more effective ad unit that could spark innovation for creative areas is making two smaller units that interact with each other, similar to what Apple did with the top and side bar on the NY Times website a few weeks ago.
  • I hear the 1024x768 ads are coming soon :)

    But seriously, these seem like large inventory for sites. The flexibility is good if the spots become ubiquitous, but I think they are distracting and make it tougher to read content.
  • Eric_Franchi
    Darren,

    Do you think the publishers will allow these units to be sold via exchanges or networks, or keep them for their own salesforces' direct selling efforts?

    I agree that the prospect of marrying these larger sizes with data is really, really exciting.

    Eric
  • I think for the foreseeable future, publishers will sell these directly as they are "new" and I suspect the margin is great for them. Also, they could bundle them with other packages to build bigger programs.

    Once publishers realize that selling small standardized programs isn't the business they want their salesforces to be handling, then these types of now standardized units will flow towards exchanges. I outline (scare) this notion with this post: http://www.darrenherman.com/2008/07/16/goodbye-...
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