At the beginning of this month, OPA (Online Publishers Association ) announced that 37 publishers began to offer new bigger ad formats:
- 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 a frequency of 1 time in 24 hours per user.
OPA also mentioned some big brands that will adopt the new formats: Bank of America will run the pushdown on CNN.com and Time.com; Mercedes-Benz will run various OPA units on FOXSports.com, msnbc.com, NYTimes.com, Reuters.com, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post and Frito-Lay ran the Pushdown on Discovery’s PlanetGreen.com in the second quarter of 2009.
Is bigger better? It depends on who you ask. The brands that could run a big budget campaign might say that their visibility is increased this way, but the readers, who don’t usually browse the Internet to see elephant-sized ads, could hate them. The fact these ads cover a lot of space where you could read useful content is a fair reason not to like them.
Robin Wauters on TechCrunch said “display advertising units on websites should become more relevant instead of just bigger”. Good point.
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