ShortTail Tests Interstitial Video Ad Format

ShortTail Media will launch a beta test this summer of Digital 30 (D30) - a full-page, interstitial placement, through which 15- and 30-second TV spots can be incorporated between web pages — as they load, for example.

In a speech at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual meeting in February, David Payne, ShortTail’s CEO (and former head of CNN.com), advocated a new approach to advertising that would be less sensitive to user experience.

D30 shifts online advertising’s “fundamental currency” away from banner ads sold on a bulk impressions basis and toward video ads sold based on a deliberately limited amount of inventory, he said.

Acknowledging that the D30 won’t get very far unless his company gets a large number of publishers and buyers on board, Payne met with 20 top publishers last week to convince them to test it. Reuters gave the nod, and MSNBC.com and Weather.com are considering joining the test, Adweek reports (via MarketingVOX).

Riley McDonough, SVP and GM of Thomson Reuters, said that during this summer’s test he would be watching to see how many users are willing to view the full commercials, surmising their tolerance may be higher now that more users have better broadband connectivity.

Joe Fiveash, EVP and GM of The Weather Channel Interactive, likes that the D30 runs between pages. Divorcing the ad from content is really interesting, he added, noting that D30 offers a new way to have video inventory on sites that don’t have enough real estate for advertising.

In 2004, it was reported that unimaginative online advertisers turned to full-screen, 30-frame-per-second, TV-style ads on the web in interstitial format, for lack of an alternative creative format.

Just last month, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) called upon major online publishers, ad agency creatives, and media firms for its first-ever gathering of the Re-Imagining Interactive Advertising Task Force. It was aimed at forming “a comprehensive roadmap for the next stages […] of interactive advertising to ensure that ad formats meet the growing business and creative needs of advertisers, agencies and publishers.”