BIG Brand Attention with High Impact Gains

Brand advertisers are continuing to look for ways to extend the reach and awareness of their products. Television commercials continue to take the lion's share of their budget even as digital continues to grow its prominence. Shifting TV commercials into digital video is one thing, and surely a correct first step. But, what will be the next big thing in digital that truly delivers reach and awareness?

Enter "high impact" digital ad units such as full page ads and homepage takeovers. Each of these has the ability to takeover all of the user's attention for a span of time before returning them to their desired content. Much like the television commercial, there's little to no chance that the user missed the ad and they generally view the majority of, if not all of, the advertising message. Sure, for TV commercials, the viewer could be in the kitchen getting a snack or, more recently, they can DVR around the commercials and in digital, there is a "close" or "skip" option for most of these ads. However, many of the ads are viewed to completion and with a high level of message recall.

Undertone introduced its PageGrabber™ unit in Q4 and was the first network to bring a scalable homepage takeover product to market. Previously, takeovers were only run on portals for scale or individual publishers for content. The reason for this was the complexity of creative — each homepage required custom creative and integration. Enter PageGrabber™, an ad unit that was designed to run across dozens of homepages at once — with a single creative execution. Ease of creative was one reason the product got off to a strong start, but clients are quickly seeing the performance value as well. Brands like AT&T and HBO were eager to be early adopters of this product, and were rewarded with results of high message recall and increased site visitation.

With many new household brands in the mix for the first half of 2011, we see PageGrabber™ becoming a leading product for brand advertisers. Expect to see more products like this coming to market this year as a result.