New online ad formats touted

As media companies voice doubts about whether they can build their digital businesses on advertising alone, technology companies are trying hard to persuade them to think more creatively, writes The Wall Street Journal.

At Allen & Co's annual gathering of media moguls in Sun Valley last week, companies ranging from upstarts to Internet giant Google touted the promise of new ad formats they said would outperform banner and search ads, the digital-ad industry's current staples.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt championed 'interactive video ads', which he said are on the way. Such ads, which could appear anywhere on a Web page, not just inside a video, would be like mini-Web pages. That means they could allow Web users to watch a video, leave a comment and see real-time updates within the ads that are more customised to their interests.

According to online business journal McKinsey Quarterly, news consumption in the UK rose 20% between 2006 and 2009, with most readers aged 35 and below, reports Straits Times.

News companies must evolve quickly with the changing media landscape to meet the demands of these younger consumers, and this is something Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) has done successfully, says SPH chairman Dr Tony Tan.

Tan, speaking at an SPH Foundation Scholarship Awards presentation ceremony, said SPH is investing $150 million in online and mobile news platforms that build on the company's core business of providing news stories and editorial design.

IBM, in collaboration with the European Union, industry and academia, has set up a research consortium which aims to help businesses take advantage of e-services to create collaborative business operations and achieve shared business goals, says PRNewswire.

The effort focuses on the development of a new computer science model that will enable organisations to accelerate the typically time-intensive process around the coordination of e-services and increase the efficiency of deploying new e-service blends.

The research will also enable small to mid-sized businesses to create or join into flexible e-service blends, without investing in expensive IT expertise. The initiative will create open source software to enable many organisations around the world take advantage of the technology.