The reports studied the effectiveness of the new ad formats approved by the IAB earlier this year, as well as a variety of ad technologies and placements.

The studies showed that standard ad banners are still effective at increasing brand awareness and purchase intent, and moreover that the new ad formats improve branding metrics by an average of 40 percent and interstitials improve metrics by an average of 194 percent.

The DoubleClick study revealed that like traditional marketing, the Internet is an effective tool for enhancing brands in the minds of consumers. Across each online marketing unit tested, traditional brand measures including aided brand awareness, aided advertising awareness, ad attribute recall, and ad recall increased considerably:

• Aggregated results for three brands across each online marketing tactic tested, showed an 85% increase in aided advertising awareness.
• Banner ads increased brand measures 56% and large rectangles 86%.
• Interstitial ads increased brand measures 194%.

"This comprehensive study provides marketers with evidence that just like offline marketing, the Internet has positive effects on brand building," said Barry Salzman, President, DoubleClick Global Media. "As an industry we must begin to embrace new sizes, formats and page implementation methods as complementary tools for reaching traditional brand marketing objectives."

In addition, the studies showed that ads using rich media technologies such as audio, video, Flash, and DHTML also have more impact than standard ads and increase branding effectiveness.

The IAB and MSN studies were conducted by Dynamic Logic and the DoubleClick study was conducted by Diameter. More details of each can be found at IAB, MSN and DoubleClick Web sites.