Continual innovation is online advertising is important, clearly. It
seems that for just about any ad format, after people get used to it
and have seen it over and over, viewing of the ads drops off. (I saw
evidence of that last year when Poynter did an eyetracking study of news websites
which included on test pages ads of fairly standard formats found out
on the Web. Standard ads often were invisible to most of our test
subjects — that is, many people’s eyes never once gazed upon them.)
CNET came out with a new format this week, called “Page Turn.” It’s
basically a product-heavy banner ad designed to mimic a store catalog. (Here’s a story from AdWeek
about it.) The banners allow an advertiser to have up to a five-page
catalog of products that can be perused without the user leaving the
page he’s on.
This is probably a trend: AdWeek notes that Point Roll and Chitika also have developed similar catalog-like online ads.
