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Byline: KEN SPENCER BROWN
Classmates Online Inc. wants you to say hello to old school chums -- and goodbye to the Web's oldest form of marketing: banner ads.
The reunion service, one of the Net's biggest advertisers, is taping a syndicated TV show set to launch this summer. It'll run on Fox-owned stations and provide plenty of high-profile marketing for the Classmates Web site.
Classmates Chief Executive Mike Smith swears the show won't be a 30-minute infomercial for the site. But he admits the publicity sure beats some 468-by-60-pixel rectangle on a Web site, the size of the conventional banner ad.
Call it an extreme example of online advertisers looking beyond the banner to woo customers.
Like dot-com IPOs, Razor scooters and spam-free e-mail, those quaint horizontal boxes are starting to strike advertisers as so 1994.
"We really try to steer our clients away from them," said Rachel Pickett, manager of media services for Austin, Texas-based ad firm Tocquigny. "People are too accustomed to seeing them. They're easy to skip over."