New York — Right in the nick of time for the first day of New York City’s Advertising Week, struggling web portal AOL Inc., made headway to take a jump on attention getting news with its latest endeavor to build a better advertising business. AOL said it has officially unveiled a new online advertising system codenamed — “Project Devil,” which essentially seeks to blow up what Web pages and Web advertising have been about until now, its top executive told Reuters on Monday.
The Internet stinks. And its ads are even worse. That is the basic, bold message being delivered by AOL, which unveiled Project Devil, a system that offers advertisers cleaner ad formats than before and more utility like the locations of local auto dealers, at the Interactive Advertising Bureaus MIXX conference in New York. The initiative is meant to cater as an all-in-one marketing funnel in a single location on a page.
Project Devil is the latest creation from AOL and is part of a broader strategy to revitalize the 25-year-old company once synonymous with dial up Internet access into one of the web’s main online entertainment and news destinations.
In an interview with technology website paidContent, AOL Global ad sales chief Jeff Levick and CEO Tim Armstrong described how this will assist the company promote its premium online advertising and unravel the problems associated with banners. “Right now this is the first step, you can bank on us to innovate for the next decade in brand advertising,” said Armstrong.
“Advertising has not fulfilled its commitment online,” added Levick, in a statement. “Brand is critical to our growth plan, and to be successful we had to reinvent what advertisers can deliver.”
Developed with creative input from the advertising industry, at the heart Project Devil aims to enhance the aesthetics impact with its more streamlined, user-friendly content pages anchored by a single, highly interactive display ad.
Despite the introduction of various sizes and formats, the basic banner ad is still the main artifact of display advertising. While the notion of bigger, more dynamic ads may have helped boost display’s rise with the ad recovery this year, most observers believe that the space still has a number of constraints holding it back from a potentially more robust future. One of the drags on display is the lack of a standard metric — though both Nielsen and comScore have offered new features this week that promise to advance that cause.
Basically, AOL is aiming for a “fundamental redesign of the Web,” said Levick. “This is incredibly bold and ambitious.”
AOL has already commenced rolling out the latest system and new publishing approach along with General Mills, Lexus, Macy’s, Procter & Gamble, Sprint and Unilever were among the partners that worked with AOL behind the scenes to develop Project Devil, which AOL took live on its Movefone.com and StyleList.com sites today and will continue rolling out on its other websites. But the long-term plan is to expand this to all other AOL properties, as well as thousands of sites across the Web.
“With 80 different properties we can touch a large portion of the Web,” Levick said.
AOL has been touting the project over the past weeks with advertisements in various media, including The Wall Street Journal. Project Devil delivers a single, large ad space, which can be divided into three panels, allowing advertisers to customize different interactive features including video, mapping, 3-D rotation, polls and text messaging.
“We discovered that it was not enough to come up with a new ad format,” Levick said. “We see this as the first fundamental redesign of the Web in the last 15 years.”
But as Gawker Media chief Nick Denton earlier described in his Q&A session with Peter Kafka at the IAB’s Mixx conference, most web pages are ridiculously designed, in that you generally have to scroll up or down for an item and ads dot every bit of white space.
But according to Levick, AOL has two huge platforms to give Project Devil a boost beyond its own sites: Advertising.com, the company’s mega ad network; and Adtech, its popular ad-serving platform.
“We have devised an ad system that allows marketer to both highlight the product, explain what it is, what problem it solves and how it makes your life better,” Levick continued. “The modules are designed not to overwhelm or be too intrusive. They provide a canvas for anything an advertiser wants to put in there — a store locater, a map, a coupon. And if a marketer chooses, the ad can have an action and response happen right there on the page.”
AOL was spun off from Time Warner Inc last year after a disastrous decade-long marriage.
“With the restructuring we have done and the more specific way we are running our sales force…it should lead us to be a much stronger company in 2011 in the advertising business,” Armstrong said but declined to offer specifics.
To know more about the new ad format here is a video demo of Project Devil: