Bigger Ad Units - A new way to get noticed

When the going gets tough, the ads get bigger.

Amid all the hand-wringing about the decline of the news business and the need for subscription revenue, big publishers are doing something concrete: They are trying to sell more ads for more money.

You see advertisements expanding to cover pages of major sites all over the Web these days. Now the Online Publishers Association has created a series of new standards for really big, intrusive, bash-you-on-the-head sorts of advertisements, which you are going to start seeing on its member sites in coming months.

The association was started by Martin A. Nisenholtz, the senior vice president for digital operations at The New York Times Company, to represent the needs of companies that offer premium content online and in turn, hope to earn premium ad rates. These days the group includes companies like CBS, Forbes, and Condé Nast.

One format is a version of the sort of expandable banner ad you’ve already seen. It starts big and then rolls up to fit at the top of the page. The other two formats will be more jarring. There is an ad, meant to go on the side of a page, that is 468 pixels wide — far bigger than other side-of-the-page formats. Publishers are going to have to squeeze the width of their editorial content on pages with this ad format.

Another format rises and falls like an elevator on the right-hand side of the page, so the ad is always in view. This means that publishers need to clear out the various other features and ads placed on the side of pages to give this ad some space to roam.

Among the first sites rolling out these formats is MSNBC, which has included them in a new design it is introducing for the pages on which its articles appear (as opposed to its home page and topical section pages).

The site has been trying to integrate more of its content — photos, videos, interactive elements — onto the same page as its articles. Until now, you often had to jump to a separate page to see a slide show or watch a video. This page from a series on Elkhart, Ind., shows off all these features and a gizmo that allows navigation between elements as you scroll the page.

It’s a bold, in-your-face design, said Kyoo Kim, MSNBC’s vice president for sales — and perfect for bold, in-your-face ads.

“When you are getting robust photos or videos within the story itself, then you can afford to have large ad units because you are not totally hijacking the user experience,” Mr. Kim said. “It’s a value exchange.”

MSNBC will use the large formats at the top and sides of its pages. It isn’t going to use the elevator ad. It had a similar unit that chased people around its site early on, and it doesn’t want to remind users of how much they disliked that format.

The company will not sell the big ads to just anyone. Rather, it will use the formats for its best customers, which sponsor entire sections or buy “roadblocks” that fill every page of the site, or a big part of it, for a period of time. MSNBC has cultivated these sorts of deals and gets 60 percent of its revenue from sponsorships.

Indeed, while the company hopes it can extract higher prices for bigger ads, the main focus initially is simply to use them to encourage companies to keep buying the sponsorships they already have. A sponsorship can cost $50,000 to $500,000 per month, he said.

In these deals, one advertiser will have all the ads on one of these new article pages: perhaps a big banner at the top, a very large rectangle along the side, and other units further down. In addition to the standard units, MSNBC has created a series of “adgets” — short for advertising widgets — that are based on technology originally developed for its news content. For example, a company might use its mapping widgets to show off various locations, Mr. Kim said.

Other members of the Online Publishers Association, including The Times, are expected to roll out support for these big ads in the coming months.

[the article was originally published at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/make-room-for-the-wide-load-ads]