Watch television, listen to the radio or even flick through this newspaper and you will see and hear commercials and advertisements that entertain, that are visually stimulating, that are traditionally creative in some way. But the internet? Now that's a different story.
The average advert on the net consists of a series of glaring, over-busy images, a flashing logo and - nine times out of 10 - a "click here" or "press me" button. That's because research carried out a year ago found that advertisers increased the chances of users accessing their sites by 50% if they specifically instructed them to.
And this, it would appear, is as sophisticated as most net advertising is at the moment. When it comes to the world wide web, you can forget about anything fancy: the new media equivalent of the Guinness "surfer" is hardly going to present itself at regular intervals.
The reasons for this are plentiful and - happily - largely surmountable, suggesting that this ghastly stuff is not going to be with us for ever. "It is in its formative stages," says Chris Ketley, managing director of Zenith Interactive Solutions. "It has only just begun. We are learning all the time about how to influence online customers, and ads are becoming more refined."
Indeed, so new is it that traditional agency creatives are still not really getting involved. It is more often than not left to the technical IT person at a web development company to devise the adverts rather than a properly trained traditional agency creative, hence the, erm, lack of creativity.
Frank Harrison, director of strategic resources at Zenith Media, says: "Net advertising is like radio was 20 years ago. The sort of people who used to be given radio adverts to do were the most junior or the least talented. It's just not sexy, and creatively is still very limited. So people who are IT knowledgeable are the ones producing the ads."
Advertising on the web so far has also just been about getting hits rather than looking pretty - but this is something that is likely to change as the medium matures. Last week, Revolution magazine reported on Sony's first ever web campaign for the launch of its digital camera, Mavica. "Rather than follow the herd with a selection of static banners [the panels across the top of websites] it entered the arena by specially tailoring video banners for the internet," the magazine said.
The adverts show people actually using the Mavica over the line - "save your memories to floppy disc and upload them to the world". The adverts appeared on sites for FHM and Maxim as dotmusic.com and Trinity Mirror's ic24 portal. Actually demonstrating the product? For the web, that's innovative.
Simon King, business development manager of Pixel Park, a full-service new media agency specialis ing in online marketing, explains why this is still the exception rather than the norm: "Net advertising does not have much thought about it, but it is about direct marketing and interaction. It's not about looking at an advert and thinking, 'That's really brilliant.' It's about eliciting a reaction, not looking nice."
The opportunities to advertise on the web consist, mostly, of banners. Aside from these there are buttons, or smaller boxes, usually at the bottom right, that are rather more subtle sponsorship arrangements with the site owner. There are also "landing pages" or "microsites", very small sites dedicated to specific subjects, and even something called virtual marketing, which involves highly targeted emails that exploit people's contacts or distribution lists by a type of electronic chain letter.
Given this complexity, it is perhaps not surprising that campaigns are also currently media-led, not creative-led, driven more by media buyers within agencies and web design companies, rather than creative teams, because they understand all the different opportunities.
Rob Watts, media manager at Pixel Park, says: "Unlike the traditional offline advertising route, where the creative arm of the agency will produce a full campaign to a client's brief and the media arm adapts to place it, here a campaign is media-led. I come up with a strategy then go to the creative team who will do the design."
The creatives will be told, for instance, that they have to devise buttons or banners of a certain dimension and they will simply be asked to come up with the strapline, the corporate colours and the tone of voice. But creatives need not be too nervous. Some basic rules of advertising apply as much to the net as to traditional offline media. As with press adverts, there are three ways to grab the consumer's attention: first with the headline, second via a picture or graphic, and third by means of a familiar logo that the consumer knows and trusts. Once they are dragged in, they can then be targeted with longer copy and a fuller advertising message.
Wisdom is also building regarding advertising creativity on the web. Doubleclick, a company that delivers banner ads to a network of internet sites, has even erected a list of creative dos and don'ts on its website. These involve top tips such as what colours to use (blue, green and yellow work best, apparently); how animation can increase response rates by 25%; how the "click here" button should be located on the right hand side rather than the left; and how using questions in the copy rather than state ments can increase the click-through rate by up to 16%. The ultimate block to creativity to date, however, has been the technology itself. Restrictions in bandwidth, for instance, have meant that media-rich sites, or sites that contain lots of complicated graphics and visuals - ie, stuff that excites the average agency creative - still take time to download. Given that most users find this frustrating, advertisers are stubbornly sticking to the simple "click me" approach. Harrison says: "An increase in bandwidth will mean video capability, for example. The medium is in rapid transition and what works today won't necessarily work tomorrow. The timescale is extremely compressed. The whole infrastructure and hardware and software are changing all the time."
Despite all this, some advertisers are achieving a degree of inventiveness in their net adverts. Comet recently mounted a campaign that consisted of more than 40 banners, instead of the usual four or five, each of which was specifically tailored to the separate host sites.
IBM, too, last year ran one of the most successful banner campaigns so far, targeted at students who were leaving university. The company bought up a database enabling it to talk to users about the specific university they had been to: such highly personalised messages meant that 50% of those who saw the site clicked on it.
Some banners are also dropping the click-through mechanism altogether and incorporating more information in themselves, so the user does not have to leave the host site and go meandering off into cyberspace. Interflora's banners, meanwhile, include a device for ordering and addressing flowers without users having to visit their site at all.
Whether creativity improves or not, advertising on the internet is obviously here to stay. Recent studies have suggested that consumers are becoming increasingly punch-drunk by offline advertising and so compa nies are turning more to the web as a medium. Amazon.com also found at the end of last year that people admit they are highly influenced by online ads - more so, even, than traditional advertising.
In the light of this almost guaranteed, even limitless, expansion of the net as a medium, it would be good to think the advertising will get a little prettier. It can't get much worse.
