What is Superstitial Ad Unit

Superstitial format is a standard in online advertising created by Unicast - a non-banner, interactive advertising solutions and Services Company for the Internet.

Superstitials are highly interactive, non-banner ads that can be any size on the computer screen and up to 100K in file size, featuring full animation, sound and graphics capable of effectively conveying integrated advertising while protecting a Web site's performance.

Pre-loaded using a patent-pending "polite" delivery system that minimizes the latency problems often experienced with streaming online advertising solutions, Superstitial ads play only upon a user-initiated break in surfing, such as a mouse click.

Superstitials can be used to achieve multiple advertising goals, including branding, direct marketing, commerce and entertainment. Superstitial ads play only once fully loaded, ensuring that every user gets a consistent and complete brand message and that each advertiser pays only for guaranteed impressions.

Additionally, because Superstitial ad units exist outside the banner space, they can create an entirely new revenue stream for Web publishers.

Source: www.webopedia.com 

Floating Ads – An Overview

A floating ad is a type of rich media Web advertisement that appears uninitiated, superimposed over a user-requested page, and disappears or becomes unobtrusive after a specific time period (typically 5-30 seconds). The most basic floating ads simply appear over the Web page, either full screen or in a smaller rectangular window.

They may or may not provide a means of escape, such as a close button. More sophisticated versions can come in any shape or size and include sound, animation, and interactive components. Floating ads use a variety of technologies, such as a combination of Flash and dynamic HTML (DHTML), and may have the ability to display differently according to the user's browser capabilities. United Virtualities and Eyeblaster (Mediamind) are two advertising media companies that offer floating ads.

Floating ads grab the viewer's attention and tend to be more interesting to view than other formats. The Boston.com Web site recently featured a highly successful campaign using United Virtualities' Shoshkele ad, in which a Boston Globe delivery truck drives on from the left and crosses the screen, with newspapers flying out of the truck to houses in the background. When the truck drives off the right side of the screen, a small rectangular ad floats up to the right top corner, offering 50% off home delivery.

According to a How Stuff Works article about Web advertising, a floating ad generates a click through rate of about 30 clicks per thousand impressions, similar to the rates for pop-up ads and much higher than the cited 2-5 clicks per thousand impressions for a banner Ad. Although the floating ads don't necessarily generate more clicks than pop-ups, they are thought to be more memorable and have a greater branding effect as a result. They often include tracking capabilities that report not only the numbers of clicks to the ads, but the number of times users reload a page to see the ad again.

Benefits of Floating Ads

1. Floating ads have proven to increase brand exposure through the delivery of visually engaging, high impact content that 'floats' above your publishers' web pages. The prevalence of the floating ad in recent years is attributed largely to the high impact it delivers.
2. Publisher is given full control over positioning and layering attributes. By specifying screen coordinates and z-index as parameter values passed to the Mediaplex ad tag, the publisher can effectively optimize the delivery of the ad so it refrains from obscuring or interfering with their site’s core content and other layer elements.
3. Publisher may control the timeout of the floating ad to comply with their own specifications. 

Source: searchcrm.techtarget.com and www.mojorichmedia.com

Types of Display Advertising

The large majority of online advertising has a cost that is brought about by usage or interaction of an ad; there are a few other methods of advertising online that only require a onetime payment. The Million Dollar Homepage is a very successful example of this. Visitors were able to pay $1 per pixel of advertising space and their advert would remain on the homepage for as long as the website exists with no extra costs.

Below are the major types of display advertising;

Floating ad: An ad which moves across the user's screen or floats above the content.

Expanding ad: An ad which changes size and which may alter the contents of the webpage.

Polite ad: A method by which a large ad will be downloaded in smaller pieces to minimize the disruption of the content being viewed

Wallpaper ad: An ad which changes the background of the page being viewed.

Trick banner: A banner ad that looks like a dialog box with buttons. It simulates an error message or an alert.

Pop-up: A new window which opens in front of the current one, displaying an advertisement, or entire webpage.

Pop-under: Similar to a Pop-Up except that the window is loaded or sent behind the current window so that the user does not see it until they close one or more active windows.

Video ad: similar to a banner ad, except that instead of a static or animated image, actual moving video clips are displayed. This is the kind of advertising most prominent in television, and many advertisers will use the same clips for both television and online advertising.

Map ad: text or graphics linked from, and appearing in or over, a location on an electronic map such as on Google Maps.

Mobile ad: an SMS text or multi-media message sent to a cell phone.

Superstitial: An animated adv on a Web page from Enliven Marketing Technologies. It uses video, 3D content or Flash to provide a TV-like advertisement. Used to be known as Unicast Transitional ads as they were originally made by Unicast Communications but the company was acquired by Viewpoint Corporation in 2004, which then changed its name to Enliven in 2008.

Interstitial ad: a full-page ad that appears before a user reaches their original destination.

In addition, ads containing streaming video or streaming audio are becoming very popular with advertisers.

Source: en.wikipedia.org