Narrative Demonstrates Commerce-Enabled Enliven Ad

Narrative Communications Corp. demonstrated a solution for commerce-enabled Web advertisements that allow credit card transactions in a banner environment.

Through tight integration with Microsoft’s Site Server 3.0, Commerce Edition, the company showed an Enliven ad for Eddie Bauer that supports secure credit card transactions, enabling the company to directly market and sell its products through online advertising.

The ad is an example of a long-awaited class of one-to-one marketing applications designed to facilitate electronic commerce, the company said.

“With our sales continuing to build at a high incremental rate, we believe a tremendous opportunity exists in extending our points of presence on the Internet through highly targeted, transaction-oriented advertising campaigns,” said Judy Neuman, vice president of interactive marketing for Eddie Bauer.

“For the first time, Enliven is allowing us to embrace this opportunity by providing an innovative platform for conveying the Eddie Bauer message to a much broader segment of the Internet market.”

“Customers benefit from the ability to simply and conveniently purchase Eddie Bauer products without leaving the context of their current Web page, resulting in more effective ads that sell products and quickly return critical market research data,” she said.

The Enliven ad solution takes advantage of Microsoft Site Server’s extensible Commerce Edition by delivering commerce transactions directly to Eddie Bauer’s back-end. Additional support is provided in Site Server 3.0 and its new Ad Server, which supports Enliven’s ad format, including capabilities for managing, scheduling, and targeting of Enliven ads.

A future version of Enliven with enhanced Site Server integration will add payment and transaction capabilities to the companies combined offerings, the company said.