LookSmart is a Melbourne based private company, majority owned by the Readers Digest Association.It has about 50 employees and an office in San Francisco supporting Sales and Marketing.
The company was stared by Evan Thornley (CEO) and Tracey Ellery in early 1996. Evan recognised that the web was changing.Today it is populated by experienced users. In the future the Web will be populated by people like your parents and neighbours.
WebTV might bring many of these new users to the Web.
The tools that are available on the web are too hard to use and the results are often confusing.(For example, a search for Holiday and Paris on Alta Vista returns 800,000 results.)
It is also easy to become lost on the Web.
Evan's objectives were to find a way to:
The new company produced a Java prototype in early 1996 (around the time the Java support was added to netscape version 2.) The current product was launched in October 1996.
It included a Java applet (that can be viewed using Netscape version 3 or Internet Explorer version 3)and several HTML versions to support users who don't have Java capable browsers or computers not sufficiant powerful to run Java.
At launch, the Java version of the product included a Java applet that served Java ads and plain gifs.(as far as I am aware, this was the first use of Java for advertising in the world)
Ads rotate within the banner space (in a separate frame in most versions of LookSmart).
Rotation can be fixed time per advert (TV model) or the advert may change each time the html page is refreshed (newspaper model).
Adverts are often targetted. The advertisers win because more relavent ads are more likely to be clicked.The users win because they are more likely to see an advert for a product that is interesting to them.
Many targeting criteria can be applied, but the most common are LookSmart category and search keyword. The ability to target an advert for an individual user is analogous to a direct mail campaign (make famous by the Reader's Digest Association!)
A barrier to the creation of java ads is the technical skill needed to create them. LookSmart has overcome this by producting a translator able to be used by graphic designers to create most of the standard visual effects. Java is an obvious technology for interactive ads, although I would expect to see some work using shockwave.
As Java ads increase in size download times increase. A wired news story included the comment:
...casual browsers could resent long load times for the Shockwave- and Java-based ads. "If someone is trying to do something on the Web and they're held up by [a large banner ad loading], they're not going to feel good about the advertiser and they're not going to feel good about the content provider, so it's a lose-lose situation," Suh said.
Platform Stability. LookSmart has found that Java within Netscape on the Mac is unreliable. As are multiple grapical applets on the same page. Javascript is also an issue.
Effective packaging of applet class files is essential to the use of Java on modem connections. The zip facility in netscape 3 is not complete - hopefully packaging will improve quickly (and with a standard approach by browser vendors!!!).
Bringing creative and technical people together so that full creative opportunities of interactive ads can be realised.
Manage burnout for Java ads. The more sopisticated the ads, the more carefully burnout must be managed.
Advertisers that embrace intelligent Java advertising can move from a group message to an individually tailored message.
This technology will bring together the best of TV, Newspaper and direct mail advertising - and then some!!!
