Most banner advertising on the Net is about as bold as bran flakes and completely ignored by Web surfers. So some sites are going to lecherous lengths to lure the almighty eyeball.
Take Excite (XCIT): A recent banner for the portal features a seductive woman, framed so that she's visible only from the bottom of the chin to the top of a plunging bustline. An embedded scroll bar invites the surfer to scroll a little lower. The banner text coos: "Looking for a playmate?"
And where does a click on the scroll bar whisk a smitten surfer? To Excite's game site, where he's invited to play a brisk game of backgammon or tackle a thorny crossword puzzle.
"Banners have gotten stale," said Joe Salvati, executive producer at Modem Media.Poppe Tyson, a firm that develops online ad campaigns. "Some people are responding by experimenting with new technology, and some are reverting to that old adage, 'sex sells.'"
Excite is doing both, according to Joe Kraus, Excite cofounder and senior vice president. "If you're a direct marketer, what do you do? Constantly test new advertisements and the response."
Excite is not alone on the prurient path. Rolling Stone Network recently ran a banner ad that showed a blond woman, lips puckered, as words flashed in sequence, "see me. feel me. click me." (The "c" and "l" were so close in "click me," they appeared to form a "d.")
Behind the banner? Music news.
"There's a definite increase in these ads," said Greg Galloway, head of online media at online ad-design firm GiantStep. "It's the old bait-and-switch that they warn you about in traditional advertising."
All the titillation comes down to the Web's fixation on click-through rates -- the measure of how many people actually click on an ad to get more information.
"People place way too much emphasis on the click itself," said Ann Green, vice president of Interactive marketing at advertising market research firm IPSOS-ASI. "It's important that, as an industry, we move away from that metric."
As in traditional advertising, the benefits of bait-and-switch ads are dubious. The misleading banners may generate a lot of clicks, but they won't generate many return customers.
Analysts refer to the angry surfer's response as the "alienation factor," or the "piss-off factor."
"You're really running the risk of turning people off with these ads," said Green.
It's a risk Excite's apparently willing to run.
"You know what, if it doesn't work, and we get complaints, we don't do it," said Kraus.
