 
Rounding-out a long and distinguished track record in the traditional Advertising space, Dick Hopple left his post as President of DMB&B North America to co-found Unicast Communications along with Rick Landsman, in 1996.
In 1999, after two years of intensive research and development efforts funded by the likes of Intel Corporation, Unicast debuted the groundbreaking Superstitial ad format, designed expressly for purposes of harnessing in a single form the branding capabilities of traditional media (specifically, Television) and the interactive potential of the Internet.
In the two intervening years since its debut, the Superstitial has established itself as one of the few ad formats capable of consistently garnering the praise and, more importantly, the business of the traditional advertisers that the Internet Advertising and Publishing industries have long been speaking of as their brightest future hope.
Though Hopple and Unicast were perhaps amongst the earliest proponents of a vision for Internet Advertising involving a broadcast-scale deployment of Television-style ads, they were certainly not the only one's who had this vision. What distinguishes the Superstitial from the rest is not the concept that lies behind it, but the specific ingenious manner in which the Superstitial is implemented, from a technical standpoint.
Using a patent-pending back-end delivery technology that caches Superstitial ads into users' browsers prior to playback and while the user's modem is idle, Unicast is able to deliver large (100K) file-size, near full-page Rich Media ads (typically authored in Flash) to users, with virtually no wait-time for the user, and without slowing down the user's surfing experience - even in the event that the user is running a 56K or slower modem.
Evidence suggests that the Superstitial is indeed a powerful advertising medium. A recent Harris Interactive Study conducted jointly with Unicast, concludes that Superstitials perform as well as Television ads in lifting key branding metrics, including Brand Recall and Purchase Intent. And, user response has purportedly been such that Superstitial-based campaigns now routinely deliver clickthrough rates to advertisers of between 5 and 15%.
Success of this magnitude means that the industry should expect Superstitials to become increasingly pervasive, and, perhaps eventually, as ubiquitous in the landscape of the Internet as Banners are at the present time. These facts alone make the Superstitial worthy of further scrutiny.
avant|marketer Editor, Ajay Segal sat down with Dick Hopple, the visionary behind Unicast and the Superstitial (and Unicast's CEO), to discuss with him the lessons the Internet Advertising industry must learn from the Superstitial about the requirements of traditional advertisers, the notion that Internet Advertising must be Television-like, the Superstitial's long-term prospects for sustainability as an intrusive ad format in an environment of growing ad clutter, the Superstitial's place in the overall marketing mix vis-à-vis Banners, and role that the Superstitial will play in turning around the Internet Content Publishing industry.
avant|marketer: Unicast is one of the few companies that has managed to create a client base comprised almost solely of the large-scale, traditional advertisers - Ford, Kraft, LL. Bean, Audi - that are widely thought to represent the greatest hope for the future of the industry, but which have been notoriously reluctant to spend on Internet media. What does the industry need to learn from the success of Unicast's Superstitial, so far as how to cater to traditional advertisers is concerned?
Dick Hopple: The starting point is for the industry to recognize that the core attribute that drives value for advertisers is format. Format - how an ad runs, how it plays, the depth of communication that the advertiser can communicate - is the reason that advertisers pay $20 CPM or so for Television ads and $2 CPM for Outdoor Billboards.
If you think about what is available in Internet Advertising - in terms of the formats that are available - what we have ranges from Banners and Skyscrapers, on one end, which are message formats very much like Outdoor Billboards, to Superstitials, on the other end of the spectrum, which are very much like Television commercials.
When you look at the top fifty advertisers in the United States - or even globally - most of these companies spend almost nothing at all on Outdoor Advertising, and those that do, spend very limited percentages of their money on Outdoor.
If the traditional advertisers aren't going to spend large percentages of their budgets on Outdoor Billboards - and that kind of message - it shouldn't be surprising to anybody that they are not going to spend large percentages of their budgets on Internet Banners and Skyscrapers.
If, on the other hand, you give them a Television-like format and thereby give them the ability to communicate with Television-like effectiveness on the Internet, they’re going to unlock their budgets. I absolutely believe that. And, in fact, we have already seen this happening: We have had 325 or so traditional advertisers who have run Superstitials across 350 or so web sites in the Unites States, and 85% of those advertisers have come back and repeated with larger buys.
avant|marketer: You make a connection between Superstitials and Television advertising, and Unicast even refers to the Superstitial as "The Internet's Commercial." While many welcome this way of thinking of Internet Advertising, there are also those that think that the Television analogy obscures the true promise of Internet Advertising and minimizes the importance of the medium's unique capabilities. The suggestion is that the industry must work to re-shape traditional advertisers' expectations of Internet Advertising, such that traditional advertisers begin to see the Internet as a unique medium, with unique capabilities, and - overall - as something other than Television. How do you respond to this?
Dick Hopple: I think it's silly for publishers to tell advertisers - the sellers to tell the buyers - that they (the buyers) don't understand, and that they need to change their thinking. I think that it is the buyer that defines what the buyer needs, and that it's the seller's job to sell it to them. So, to tell advertisers that they don't get it, and need to think of the Internet as different than Television or Radio or other, more effective media I think is crazy.
Yet, in effect, this is what the industry has been doing for the last five years. It has been saying to the advertiser, "we sell Banners, and if you want to buy Banners, then great. If you don't want to buy Banners, then you don't understand, you don't get it."
But, advertisers voted on Banners, and they voted "No."
That said, I think that there is a lot of thinking that needs to be done on the part of advertisers and their agencies to understand how best to combine Television communication effectiveness with the interactive potential of the Internet - the ability to conduct a one-to-one dialog and to get users involved in the ad.
We are running an ad right now for Absolut Citron, which, when the ad comes-up and plays, the user's cursor is on a little lemon-carving knife which the user then uses to peel a lemon peel off of an Absolut Citron bottle. This is a very interactive ad, and, I think, a spectacularly creative ad, that uses the interactivity potential of the Internet to get the user more involved in the advertisement. And, the more the user gets involved in the advertisement, the more they remember the message, and the more they remember the message, the more positively they feel toward the brand.
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