7am News Offers InfoAds, Brandware

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Instant banner update technology is getting hotter. Both Darwin Digital and TotalNEWS are releasing applications for updating banners with news and fresh ads on the fly, and a third player, 7am News, already is offering the solution.

7am offers its InfoAd concept, comprised of a 5k Java applet and 1.6k of graphics. The banner ads carry live news headlines, and clicking on an ad logo in the banner takes the user directly to an advertiser's site.

TotalNews calls its solution the "Headline Ad-Solution" and bills it as advertising "Disguised as Content."

Darwin Digital, part of Saatchi & Saatchi and Time Inc. New Media, last week said they are also working on an instantly updateable news headline/banner ad solution to be called NOW banners, also a Java product.

7am's Bruce Simpson said his company developed the technology a year ago and is using it over a network of more than 6,000 Web sites carrying the ticker and registering around 500,000 individual ticker-loads per day.

"You can obviously imagine my frustration at having done an immense amount of work to design and develop these concepts, even bringing them into widespread use--only to have other "johnny-come-latelys" steal the lime-light," said Simpson in an email message to Internet Advertising Report.

7am calls it the "push-to-page" model. The first example is the 7am Live News Ticker which delivers a range of channels including the latest news headlines and links directly to a user's Web page.

As for InfoAd, the New Zealand company says "the tight binding between valuable content (the news headlines) and the advertisers branding or message ensures the advertiser gets maximum exposure to their viewing audience." An example can be found here.

The headlines can be made to scroll vertically or horizontally onto the screen rather than just "appearing."

7am also has a branding applet called "Brandware".