Sledgehammer Superstitials Hit Online Users

The behavioral psychologist Abraham Maslow once noted, “When your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.” Unicast ? a New York online advertising technology firm whose name infers anything but interactivity ? today unveiled what might be the banner ad version of the sledgehammer.

Their Superstitial banner is a 300-kilobyte ad that rises to cover approximately two-thirds (550 x 480 pixels) of the computer screen with up to 20 seconds of ‘rich media’ advertising. Despite the Interactive Advertising Bureau‘s recommended 100-kilobyte maximum size for interstitial and pop-up ads, Universal Pictures and ADiamondisForever.com have agreed to advertise with Superstitials, DoubleClick has announced its support of Superstitials, and among the networks and publications that have announced they will Superstitials are About.com, Business.com, BusinessWeek Online, ESPN.com, Excite, FastCompany.com, Fodors.com, Inc.com, Kiplinger.com, Maxim.com Sportsline.com, Office.com, PCWorld.com, Reel.com, Terra Lycos, uBid.com, Weather.com, and Zagat.com.

Does anyone other than me remember when the majority of what a person saw a computer screen was the Web content that he’d gone to see?

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.