Advertisers are doing everything they can to get themselves noticed and with a high concentration of broadband penetration in Canada, it’s no surprise that broadband ads – the newest and (it seems) latest media frontier — are appearing wherever they can. Log on to any news site and you’ll see video to complement content. In the U.S., this was the second year for a broadband upfront market, signaling yet another up-and-coming player in the race to net eyeballs.

In Canada, the vehicle is just starting to catch fire. Among the few examples up and running, ZenithOptimedia has just this week launched a campaign for Pizza Pops that invites users to send a pizza splat to friends. Within the ad is the ability to track how many people type in an e-mail address, how many screensavers are downloaded and more.

‘Users can do different things within the ad,’ says Michael DiGiovanni, online manager at ZenithOptimedia. ‘You take the functionality of a Web site and you place that within the ad so you get to continue the transaction. There’s an ability to do more here without the ridiculous price point [of other media].’

‘With broadband, it’s more than impressions and clicks. You really get to understand your ROI, ‘ he says.

‘There’s a shift from the TV to the Internet,’ says Bart Feder, president and CEO of the Feed Room, a New York City-based broadband content aggregator that names Reuters, I-Village and Business Week as clients. ‘[Ad] agencies are buying out sites and there’s a very defined CPM. Starcom Mediavest was the first company to do this in the U.S.’

It just makes sense with the big push by marketers to prove ad spending efficacy, and online is, arguably, unmatched for this. With broadband ads, just about everything is trackable – from what clips are watched to how long it’s watched; from which clips are sent to friends to where the user referral came from and how often they’re coming back.

Shawn Hall, director of IP at Toronto’s Starcom Mediavest agrees with Feder. ‘I can see it happening soon,’ he says. ‘There’s not a ton of inventory for it now so it’s still open. But [I can see it] getting tighter. There’s going to be a lot more rich media at the end of 2005 and into 2006.’

This year, Hall has worked on a campaign for Disney with an embedded video feature and search functionalities. ‘The value for advertisers is that you can add a tone, a look and feel so you get a brand personality. And because engagement is longer, it becomes more impactful. Engagement is increased when you add rich media. You can see how many panels are looked at and how long they watched the video. And you structure sales to take them from awareness to interaction to engagement and then you have the sign-up or register function – all within one piece of creative.’

For Feder’s clients at the Feed Room, ‘video ads are not about click-through, interactivity or branding – it’s about all of them. It’s more than what [advertisers] get on TV.’ His team has powered a content microsite for Diet Coke in the U.S. on Reuters. The beverage giant sponsors ‘On a Lighter Note,’ a collection of light news stories brought to you by you-know-who. Click on the banner ad and you’re in the middle of ‘Hotel You,’ a virtual hotel with rooms for news, travel, a Zagat survey, food and style. Mouse over the rooms and you’re taken to various points along the route to the Diet Coke ‘Best of Summer Guide.’ Before you know it, you’ve spent more than 10 minutes browsing through the content.

‘We’ve found that people have spent 16-18 minutes per visit watching things online such as ‘telenovellas,’ a condensed version of Spanish soaps. For live sports shown online, we find people are watching 70 minutes’ worth,’ says Feder.

But, says Jonathan Lister, VP, audience division at AOL Canada, a portal for broadband: ‘Today the cost is still prohibitive. There are still not a lot of ads shot just for online. It’s still reserved for the big advertisers such as the Nikes, General Motors or L’Oreal. But the advertisers that are already spending the dollars are using [the availability of broadband] to up their production values.’