An extension to OnlineAdvertising Agressive Advertising refers to the online ads that are interusive by nature to the online experience. Examples are Shoskeles, EyeBlaster, UniCast , Flash, PopUp and PopUnder ads. I participated in a OPA ( Online Publishers Association ) meeting on Agressive Ads. Our Beth Higbee and Ron Feinbaum were there. Presentations were made by C|Net, Salon.com and others. I learned a lot. First, the intrusive versus interuptive distinction. Users are generally acceptive of intrusive dhtml ads. They rebel against interruptive ads. Examples: Ads that obscure parts of the page temporarily are intrusive. Ads that cause the page to wait for the ads to finish before displaying content due to elaborate animation or excessive download times or pop unders, are interruptive. Also, Salon had compiled a number of interesting stats on user reaction to ads. First, agressive ads must be in line with your brand. ( Ie, no riske` ads on hgtv or oxygen.com, etc ) Second, animation that loops forever is considered too distracting. This is further broken down to the following guidelines: * gifs should loop no more than 3 times * animations lasting less than 6 seconds generally become ignored. * animations lasting more than 30 seconds are generally received as annoying. * animation between 10 and 15 seconds tend to actually engage the user. * a frequency cap should be put on intrusive ads 1 -3 per day. * the duration of intrusive campaigns should be kept short. Your loyal users will have gotten the point of the ads and find then very annoying after a week or two. Two weeks is probably the limit. Salon has found a lot of success selling advertising based on day-parts. Time slices where the ads are used like sponsorships. This is like the radio advertising model. They also do BrandBlasting, where for a certain daypart, all advertising is made up of variations of ads promoting the same brand for an advertiser for the entire day part - 100% of the channel. ----- well, a week went by and as predicted the category sites that attended the meeting are eager to begin their agressive advertising campaigns. Rather than BrandBlasting based upon day parts, like Salon, ( which Bob Benz pointed out to me is the radio model ), they are calling them SurroundSessions. They happen once per user per day, and last for sokme number of page views. Pretty ingenious. As always, out technical advertising staff was caught off guard by the initiative and have to stall and back peddle why they get DoubleClick to propse a method for handling it without breaking everything else they've got going. Chalk one up for reactive. For those keeping score at home, that Reactive 9 million, Proactive 0.