Online and in Your Face

Made You Look: The Adman of Eyeblasters Inc. Had an Idea That Clicked

NEW YORK

Does this sound familiar? You type an Internet address and suddenly your browser is frozen and American Express drops a curtain over the text you are reading. Twice. Or a giant Papa John's pizza slowly floats across your screen, like an edible blimp. Or a foot stomps into view, with the words "Power to Your Feet" under the sole. Nike would like a moment of your time.

The Web -- huge swaths of it, anyway -- has been turned into a maddening dodge 'em course of blinking banners and gaudy animation. It's like a library where they deliver the books in a clown car: silence one moment, pig whistles the next. The cursor has become the new fly swatter, the "close" button our national mosquito.

This surely took the collusion of thousands, including legions of CEOs, ad execs and Web site publishers. (Among them, the honchos at Washingtonpost.com, it must be said.) So there is plenty of blame to go around. Singling out one man merely for the sake of retribution -- just to put a human face on this accursed hassle -- well, that would be grossly unfair.

But it would be fun.

So shake hands with Gal Trifon! If you want someone to answer for the millions of promotional rattraps now coiled around the Internet, Trifon is a fine place to start. He is the president of an outfit called Eyeblaster Inc., and there is more than a little pride in his voice when he says, "We were actually the first to introduce the floating ad."

Yes, Trifon and his colleagues dreamed up the wafting cyber-irritant that crawls into your line of sight and won't leave until it evaporates or gets shooed away. Eyeblaster also claims to have pioneered or popularized the "full-page overlay," the "push-down banner" and a host of Incredibly Annoying Online Advertising Formats, or IAOAFs, if you will.

We're not talking about pop-up ads, which, Trifon is eager to explain, is something Eyeblaster has never sold. Those are rare these days, in large part because of the advent of easy-to-use pop-up blockers. (Pop-unders, the pop-up's evil twin, lives on).

An IAOAF -- or a rich-media ad, as the industry calls it -- basically takes the pop-up concept and adds a cheerleading squad's worth of sis-boom-bah. The spread of high-speed Internet made it possible to pile on features, including streaming video and animation, plus motion of every imaginable variety, plus countless ways to show up, linger and vanish. The goal now isn't merely to interrupt, as it was in the pop-up days. It's to interrupt and engage.

Not so good for you, but very good for Eyeblaster. The privately held company started about seven years ago in Israel with four people and now runs offices in 11 countries, with 150 employees. It has rivals, with kinetic names such as Eyewonder and PointRoll, but Eyeblaster did for the Internet what the 30- and 60-second ad did for television: It basically invented the standard.

One day recently, Trifon, who is 37, sat down in a conference room with a laptop and gave a little Eyeblaster demonstration. He was dressed in the smart-casual style that is apparently required of admen in New York, the blend of serious and funky that reassures clients that you are both responsible and highly creative. Trifon, who speaks with a slight accent from his homeland, has a weakness for phrases like "vertical opportunity," and he uses the word "platform" a lot, but an evangelical enthusiasm shines through the jargon.

"This one is probably a more obvious way of interacting with an advertisement," he says, cueing an ad.