Online and in Your Face
Made You Look: The Adman of Eyeblasters Inc. Had an Idea That Clicked

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 3, 2006

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.

Up comes a Web site from Spain, on which there is a square with a small animated dog in the middle. It's a pitch for something called Nintendo DS, and when Trifon rolls his cursor over it, the ad erupts with motion and sound. A red ball in the dog's mouth bounces across the screen and you, the viewer, are instructed to use your cursor to "toss" the ball to the pooch, who is now barking. And barking. And barking and barking and barking. It's a game of online fetch, except that you want to strangle the dog.

"Forty percent of the people who saw this ad interacted with it," Trifon says. "Surprisingly enough."

Return the ball and you're whisked to a Nintendo site. Close the window and the ad is muted -- though only after a delay that will momentarily lead you to believe that the barking will never cease and that you need to throw out your computer and kill yourself.

* * *

About $1.5 billion will be spent this year on rich-media ads. By 2010 the figure will rise to $3.5 billion, according to Jupiter Research, a media analysis company. These are exhilarating numbers for the thousands of Web sites that are asking a pretty basic question: How are we supposed to make money?

The subscription model, unless you're selling porn or, in rare cases, specialized information, doesn't seem to work. Which means advertisers will have to foot the bill, leaving them, along with Web publishers, to locate the magical divide separating "too intrusive" from "just intrusive enough" when it comes to ads.

Where that line is depends, in part, on which medium you think the Internet most closely resembles. If it is most like magazines or newspapers, then an ad that takes over your screen, even for a couple of seconds, will seem intolerable. If it's like television, even the most grating online ads are timid. A typical half-hour sitcom, after all, contains as much as eight minutes of ads, a ratio of content to commercials that wouldn't cut it online.

Television and print have had decades to figure out exactly how much advertising they can throw at an audience. Not the Web.

"We're one step beyond bearskins and knives with Web advertising," says Paul Palumbo of AccuStream Research, a download media research firm. "The beauty of the Internet is that you learn pretty quickly what the audience will tolerate."

Rich-media ads, at least for now, are tolerated. This has made Eyeblaster's vexing handiwork part of everyday life for millions and millions of people, but Trifon's spiel about his company and its success is disappointingly low on triumphant cackles. The guy talks about his product like a doctor who has discovered the cure for a disease. His ads are zingier and more effective, he says, which means that Web publishers can charge more for them, which means fewer ads on each page, which is good for Web surfers.

"With the formats we've introduced, an advertiser is asked to pay five, ten times as much as he paid in the cluttered environment of a few years ago," says Trifon. "But that can be justified because the [advertising] agency can prove that users are actually seeing these units, engaging in these units."

The idea for the floating online ad was born, of all places, in a supermarket in Israel, not long after Trifon had co-founded an earlier incarnation of Eyeblaster. He was shopping for groceries one day when he heard a voice on an intercom announce a deal on baguettes -- like a blue light special at Kmart.

"That happens in supermarkets in Israel, these promotions," he says. "We call them 'bursting messages,' and you hear them when inventory is running out or when a new product is on sale. We wanted something that worked like bursting messages, except online."

In 2000, the Web site ivillage.com used an Eyeblaster-enabled floating ad to promote Christmas gifts that could be purchased through the site. It was just Santa sitting in his sleigh, dragged across the screen by reindeer. But the ads were grabbers and the format caught on. The next year, producers of the movie "Moulin Rouge!" ran floating ads, the first of Hollywood's many online campaigns.

Eyeblaster doesn't control the content of the ads. Ad agencies handle that. What Trifon and his employees do is build and maintain the system that makes those ads float, stream, rotate or whatever, and they track the inventory of available ad space on the Web. They also tally how many people actually saw the ad, and how many bought something.

Which gets back to an aforementioned truth: As delightful as it might be to pin the scourge of floating pizzas and yapping pooches on one man, a whole flotilla of players is actually responsible. Ad agencies, not Eyeblaster, decide how these rich-media ads are triggered, how meddlesome they are and how difficult it is to find their "close" buttons. And Web publishers set what you could call the "vex specs" of their sites. Every site details, on an "advertise with us" link, precisely how much intrusion it will countenance: whether and how long an ad can take over a page, and how frequently, whether it's okay to play "hide the close button" and so on. The smart sites understand that rich-media ads can harm the bottom line as much as they help.

"The good news is that the Net is a fairly Darwinian system," says Joseph Crump, creative director at Avenue A/Razorfish, an online ad firm. "People are sophisticated, and they're not trapped. When something is annoying, they can click to something else."

* * *

Exactly how effectively rich-media ads work is a bit of a mystery. Most sites charge advertisers a "cost per impression" fee, which means that the more people who see the ad, the more a site earns. Unlike with TV or radio, it's easy for ad agencies and Web publishers to determine exactly how many people saw an online ad, how many people printed a coupon or sent their e-mail address, etc. But specific numbers on specific campaigns are rarely made public; for competitive reasons, no one in this business likes to share.

It's easy, though, to find customers who say they are pleased.

Like La-Z-Boy Inc., the comfy chair maker. The company launched its first rich-media ad in September, a real tummy-turner in which the Web page is taken over by a couple dozen La-Z-Boy chairs, arrayed in a circle. The chairs spin around, then spiral toward the center of the page, whirling faster and faster, a dizzying vortex of welted roll arms and leather. Then this tag line:

"We have chairs that make your head spin."

You assume this is the world's first joint advertising venture between a furniture company and the makers of Dramamine. But it's not.

"The ads did well for us," says Jennifer Sievertsen, vice president of brand marketing. Well, there was one site that mistakenly made it difficult to close the ads, she said, and that led to some testy e-mail. But that problem was fixed quickly. "The Net for us is now third in importance, right behind print and TV. And I'd call it a close third."

There are, however, rich-media skeptics, too. A Web usability firm called the Nielsen Norman Group -- which has nothing to do with Nielsen TV ratings, by the way -- conducted a study recently that charted the eyeball movements of 250 people as they surfed the Net. The computers were rigged with infrared lights, which were pointed at the pupils of the participants, and an imaging device, which recorded the path of the infrared light as it bounced off their eyes. (NNG swears nobody was harmed in this experiment.)

"We thought people would be distracted by these rich-media ads," says Kara Coyne, NNG's director of research. "But they're not. People don't even look at them. It's pretty amazing."

What NNG found is that most surfers look at graphical ads for about a tenth of a second, if at all.

"People on the Web are used to a fluid experience, and when you take control away from them, they're not happy about it," Coyne says. "Sometimes they're livid. We heard a lot of swearing, a lot of 'I hate this!' "

* * *

The skeptics and boosters here are quarreling over an issue as old as the cash-back rebate. Maybe older. People hate advertising, but love what advertising underwrites. So an implicit deal is struck: Advertisers get to annoy the audience, and the audience gets to ignore the advertisers. It works as long as the advertisers don't get too abrasive, and as long as enough of the audience is roused to spend some money.

Trifon believes that if an online ad is good enough, people will watch it, just as they do on TV. To spur admen to Eyeblaster-based greatness, the company has for years given out creativity awards to agencies -- like an Emmy, except nobody knows about it. One year a trophy went to the team behind a Zippo lighter ad that basically dimmed your browser, so it looked as if someone had turned off the lights in your computer. Then, a Zippo lit up and the contents of the page flickered as though the flame were the only illumination. Then the lights went back on.

"It was a breakthrough," Trifon says. "We would never have thought of that."

Surfers might have been inclined to give the ad something less flattering than a prize. And yet on some level it's hard not to root for Eyeblaster, which ultimately is just trying to usher the Internet to financial viability. The nightmare, for Trifon -- and for the many sites praying that rich-media ads lead to profits -- is that these ads multiply so fast, and get so intrusive, that they provoke a backlash. With the backlash could come the Web's answer to TiVo, a technology that allows you to skip past that "word from our sponsors." Or enough stigma could spur the growth of "paid search" ads, the quieter, mild-mannered ads made popular by Google.

There's no groundswell yet, but there is Ted Mielczarek and a few people like him. Mielczarek helped design a program that is basically a rich-media blocker, now available for download with the Firefox Web browser.

"I reached my threshold of pain a while ago," he says. "Remember that 'punch the monkey' ad that was all over the Net for a while? I think that put me over the edge."