9th Square Offers Expanding Banners

9th Square, a provider of e-commerce Web banner solutions, delivered its E*Banner suite of products, offering banners that are designed to expand when users click on them.

The company said E*Banners work at the same speed as traditional banner advertisements and expand when users click on them, transforming them into mini-sites that eliminate the loading time and navigation issues associated with pop-up windows, while allowing consumers to easily call up information or purchase products directly from the advertisement.

Narrative Communications just came out with a similar feature for Enliven 3.0.

“By turning ads into mini-commerce sites, E*Banners allow our customers to build trust with online consumers by making sure that they can transact real-time without moving to another Web site, saving them the aggravation of navigating back or losing their way,” said Tom Burgess, CEO of Newport, RI-based 9th Square. “At the same time, advertisers have a new. . . more effective way to interact with the rapidly growing community of online consumers.”

The company said it is in the process of conducting E*Banner tests for companies including TicketMaster, Invest or’s Business Daily, Free Realtime.com, Autoweb.com, and SportSite.com.

The E*Banner suite also offers the ability for the consumer to interact with an advertiser’s service representative using either a real-time chat feature or by requesting an immediate “call-back” by phone.

The full product suite includes:

• E*Banner–an expandable Web banner to sell products, exchange information or advertise a brand.
• E*Banner Infostation–provides primary market research data for vendors.
• E*Banner Ministore–provides end-to-end electronic commerce to merchants for individual product or service sales.
• E*Banner Service Center–provides customer service including human contact by phone or sales rep chat.
• E* Server Advertising Server–described by the company as the “fastest ad server in the industry.”

Design costs for an expanding E*Banner are generally under $5,000, the company said. Per-sale revenue sharing would be considered, 9th Square said.