Ads you just can't resist -- unfortunately

Byron Biggins seems like a nice enough fellow, even though he's peddling a product that can best be described as . . . evil. Well, that's too harsh a word. But the temptation to use it is nearly irresistible. Anything having to do with Internet pop-up advertisements seems to carry the Mark of the Beast. They're so roundly hated that millions of us use a variety of software products to defend ourselves from them.

Now comes Biggins, vice president of sales at FPBA Group LLC, a California firm that won't take no for an answer. FPBA's new gimmick, the "popstitial," aims ads precisely at those who don't want them.

Tools such as the excellent pop-up blocker offered by the Google search service may seem like a blessing to the typical Web surfer. But to Biggins, advertising is a noble enterprise, one that pays the freight at many free Internet sites.

"The reason they're getting free content on sites is that they're paid for by the ads," he said. "If publishers are unable to get enough revenue from advertising on their sites, they may switch over to paid content."

So looking at ads is for our own good. Why do we foolish mortals resist? Even Biggins admitted that people have good reason to despise pop-ups.

"They haven't been used judiciously," he said. "The goal of advertising is not to annoy people. The goal of advertising is to get the message across."

And Biggins will deliver the message, whether it annoys you or not. Yet FPBA doesn't use pop-up technology. The company specializes in a somewhat less-irritating technique, the "interstitial."

You've probably seen this kind of ad on many websites. Say you're reading a multipage article and you click the icon for Page 2. Up pops a full-page ad for shampoo or candy or the latest Hollywood blockbuster. It's an interstitial page, slipped into the crack between pages of the article. After a few seconds, it disappears, to be replaced at last by Page 2. Or you can click a button on the ad to make it vanish instantly.

Biggins said industry research finds that interstitials are about as inoffensive as Internet advertising gets. Only 42 percent of viewers dislike them, compared to much higher figures for banner ads and those accursed pop-ups.

But FPBA may have found a way to make interstitials every bit as unpopular, by throwing them at people who use pop-up blockers. These blockers have no effect on interstitials, which appear inside the browser like any other Web page. So FPBA devised code that sits on a Web server and detects when a visitor is blocking pop-ups. If such a visitor clicks any link on the site, he's taken to an interstitial page, which displays the ad from the blocked pop-up.

FPBA's corporate motto might as well be, "There Is No Escape." You'll see the ads they want you to see, whether you want to or not. It's as if your TV set automatically paused the commercials when you go to the bathroom, to make sure you never missed a moment of all that lovely marketing.

So far, the new popstitials are only being used by a Web advertising firm in the Netherlands, but Biggins says that's just the beginning. "We've received a lot of interest from advertisers and publishers," he said.

No doubt. It's probably because traditional website advertising is taking its own sweet time emerging from the slump that accompanied the turn-of-the-century tech market crash. As a result, website operators are hunting for new ways to attract ad dollars.

Overall, Internet advertising is booming like never before. The Interactive Advertising Bureau reported last week that fourth-quarter ad spending in 2003 was $2.2 billion, the highest quarterly level ever recorded, better even than the glory days of the dot-coms. The trouble is that most of the new money is flowing to the search services, with everybody's favorite, Google, getting the lion's share.

Few people seem to mind that when they search Google, they get ads related to the topic they're researching. Maybe that's why advertisers love this approach. Last year, 31 percent of all ad dollars spent in the second quarter went to the search engines, up from just 9 percent in 2002. Meanwhile, the kinds of banner ads that provide the revenue for many websites got 22 percent of the dollars, down from 32 percent the previous year.

Hence the hunger for pop-ups and popstitials -- any gimmick that delivers ads to eyeballs and dollars to coffers. You can't blame FPBA; it has found a need, and is trying to fill it.

But it's a need created by public revulsion at Internet advertising gone nuts. Major ad publishers, including, alas, Boston.com, the digital sibling of The Boston Globe, continue to serve pop-ups.

But the biggest Internet firms are backing away. Microsoft Corp., Time Warner Inc.'s America Online, and Earthlink Inc. are all purging pop-ups from their online services in response to public complaint. Plainly they've realized that consumers don't hate all Internet ads -- just the ones that are shoved down their throats.

That's why Google has had such success giving away software that directs people to its own ads while blotting out the irksome pop-ups of others. Perhaps Google engineers are already developing a way to block FPBA's popstitial ads, too.

God bless them.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.