Ads are a lot like fishing lures, flashy hooks tossed into a sea of consumers. Until recently, however, the tackle selection available to online ad designers was sorely limited, and the fish, as it were, had learned to stop biting.

Today, banner ads still make up roughly half of Internet ad sales, the vast majority of those being the diminutive and familiar 468x60-pixel rectangles into which companies have long been obliged to cram their messages. The industry is evolving, however, and in the current market, publishers have had to give up real estate in order to entice more advertisers online. Suddenly, large 250x250 square banners are running smack in the middle of Web pages or running down the side of the browser window like newspaper columns.

In February, the IAB released specifications for seven new ad formats that it hopes will be adopted as industry standards. One of the most popular of these is the so-called wide skyscraper, a 160x600 spire that rises up the right-hand side of browser windows, consuming more than three times as much page space as standard banners.

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Not surprisingly, studies show that skyscrapers are more effective than traditional banners in terms of both branding and click-through rates. Teen network Snowball.com, for example, announced an 18 to 36 percent improvement in click-through rates using skyscrapers. Skeptics will point out that it's a 36 percent increase over next to nothing, but still, that's a move in the right direction. While some of that impact is doubtless the novelty of the format, smart media buyers will take advantage of it before the shine wears off and returns start to diminish.

Rich media, poor media
In addition to size concessions, publishers have made bandwidth compromises as well, allowing designers a greater degree of freedom. Where typical banner ads were generally restricted to a maximum download of 10K, skyscrapers may range up to 25K. With the added memory comes the ability to create more dynamic ads and experiment with so-called rich media.

In brief, the term rich media refers to any ads featuring multimedia enhancements: animation, sound, or even streaming video. Another less-than-startling conclusion of the recent studies held that ads that flash, twitch, or otherwise bust a move are more liable to attract users. According to findings by DoubleClick, such ads had a 71 percent higher impact than their static counterparts.

Not that animated banners are new; GIF89 has been a part of the repertoire for years. But the latest rich-media campaigns go far beyond the normally jerky graphical interchanges to deliver seamless animation and greater depth of content.

For example, a Volvo ad executed by the rich-media company Enliven features an opening Flash animation in which a safety pin morphs into the shape of a car. When a user, thus lured, mouses over a set of tabs in the banner, the ad expands into a large pop-up window that provides considerable detail on options such as financing and safety features. No click-through is involved; rather, it's as if the Volvo Web site (or a significant part of it) were brought to the user by way of the Flash Player.