• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, May 13, 2010

Because I write about media and advertising, all of my acquaintances seem to think I am personally responsible for their many frustration with online ad units. At the very least, they think I should be able to do something about it. "Dad, make them stop sending me Viagra ads, and tell them I am not really interested in penis enlargement," my teen daughter whines. My partner sends me detailed notes by email about how an oversized push down unit on her favorite woman's site repositions all the content on the page and then retracts it all back again when the ad retreats. "You should tell them this is irritating," she says.

Done. "They" have been told. Marketers, my partner doesn't like your push down ads. So cut it out.

Actually we all do share a hatred of rollovers, if only because publishers have put their in-text and rich media units on some kind of hair trigger. On some Web pages just moving the mouse around looks like an old VH1 Pop-Up Video episode on fast forward.

So I was happy to see that the rollover element in Firefly's innovative and promising new ad unit actually lets you back out of engaging their banner-based ad unit. The new Firefly platform uses a standard rich media banner placements to pull you into a video ad. The demo units I saw for Mercedes and Samsung start with a rich media rectangle on a Web page that has a short video teaser clip. The motion in the ad doesn't tell you much other than that this is a unit that promises a video experience if you mouse over. When you do engage the ad, however, it politely gives you a five-light countdown as it loads when you can pull away and deactivate.

But you may want to stay engaged in these Firefly unit because they have some very impressive features. The banner lead-in model allows the advertiser to distribute video content but use the targetability and scale of display. Firefly is partnering with Tribal Fusion to make the units available across its 120 million uniques. But the model also lets users self-select and turn from passive pre-roll viewers to potential leads.

The video player that erupts from this rich media ad fills the screen with something closer to a micro-site. A set of while tiles cascade onto the screen to form a backdrop for this enormous pop-up experience. The video ad plays in its own window but it can be surrounded by other marketing opportunities like sign-ups, more videos, direct downloads of more material. The Prudential ad on the demo page is especially good in this regard. Firefly has done some experimental run 25 campaigns for the likes of Dannon, Nissan, Proctor & Gamble and Asics. One campaign done with Starcom generated over 60,000 prospects in a few weeks. The Firelfy model is performance based. According to CMO Marc Barach, "they do not pay for the running of the teaser unit. That takes all the risk out of the equation for the advertiser."

Barach says that the banner-based distribution allows for remarkable scale. He says that the Firefly beta campaigns are getting hundreds of thousands of engagements very quickly.