HBO Bows Rich-Media Ad Effort
HBO, the premium cable unit of AOL Time Warner, will launch an online ad campaign today to promote Band of Brothers, a dramatic miniseries that was produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. The rich-media effort is unique because it requires no download or plug-in and can be viewed across any operating system.
The campaign will appear exclusively on weather.com, the Atlanta-based online division of The Weather Channel. Using a technology called “shoshkeles” that was developed by New York-based United Virtualities, the ad “interacts” with content on weather.com.
For example, silhouettes of World War II-era planes fly across the site’s masthead, and paratroopers descend the page while a user visits the site. United Virtualities has a proprietary technology that allows a transparent “overlay” of creative assets to appear over a browser page.
HBO execs declined to disclose spending, but per CMR Interactive, HBO spent about $300,000 on interactive marketing initiatives in 2000.
Debra Brown, CEO at United Virtualities, said that a “shoshkelized” ad can appear on any browser, including the notoriously prickly AOL browser, which often cannot support rich-media ads.
Jes Santoro, vice president of media and business development at EarthQuake Media, the New York-based agency that created the campaign, said it was important to reach the AOL user base because “we just happen to have an AOL company as a client.” EarthQuake Media partnered with Glow Interactive on the creative.
Michelle Ross, strategic alliance director at United Virtualities, said the turnaround time for assets to be shoshkelized is about four days.
Brown said costs for shoshkelizing an ad are on a CPM basis and range from $5-45.
Paul Iaffaldano, chief revenue officer at weather.com, said the site encourages advertisers to experiment with rich media, and has used formats such as dHTML banners, EyeWonder and Enliven in the past. He added, however, that weather.com “won’t run a rich-media ad that’s going to break someone’s machine.
“We test all rich-media ads to make sure they work in all instances,” he said.
The 10-part miniseries, set during WWII, is scheduled to debut on Sept. 9. K
— Kipp Cheng Published: September 03, 2001
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