Yahoo Inc. has debuted a new ad unit on its Yahoo Finance Web portal that the company hopes advertisers will consider an alternative to print ads.
Called the SuperREC — for super rectangle — the ad unit sits dead-center across the top of the page. Travelocity.com is the first advertiser to take advantage of the SuperREC.
“We're looking to up the bar and provide more efficient advertising,” said Adam Taggart, brand manager at Yahoo Finance. “The SuperREC is a more effective, more high-impact advertising unit on the Internet.”
The unit, which runs alone on the page, enables advertisers to include up to 10 seconds of Flash animation, Taggart said.
“We wanted to make it noticeable for users but not intrusive,” Taggart explained. The ads are frequency capped, he said. Currently, the cap is set to display only once. The second time someone visits the Yahoo Finance page, they will see what Yahoo calls an L-REC ad, or large rectangle, which is actually a square ad that resides in the upper, right-hand corner of the page.
“Many of our users come to Yahoo Finance multiple times a day to check stock quotes,” he said. “We don't want people to ignore it.”
Taggart also said the SuperREC was developed with print advertising in mind. He likened it to a special newspaper insert.
“It offers dramatically more surface area for an advertiser to get their message across,” he said. “A key part of this initiative was to develop a viable alternative to print advertising. It's like the inside cover of a magazine.”
