Duncan Riley’s “Fully Transactional Web 2.0 Banners” Revisited

Back in July 2007, Duncan Riley was excited about advertising again. Tailgate, whose technology “delivers ecommerce transactions from the banner itself,” had Duncan amazed.

He commented:

The benefits from web sites owners are immediately obvious: using Tailgate, advertisements will no longer take users from their sites. For advertisers, capturing impulse buyers just became that much more easy.

It’s usually difficult to get excited about advertising technology, and countless “new” offerings usually tend to be just variations on an existing theme. Tailgate on the other hand is quite simply remarkable.

Tailgate could well be the banner advertising unit of tomorrow.

Of course, at the time, I predicted that Tailgate would wind up tailgating at the deadpool and provided a common sense rationale why.

So I couldn’t help but chuckle when I read Duncan’s post on mediaFORGE, which just “launched a new interactive ad platform that marries banner ads and widgets.”

In the post, it looks like Duncan’s excitement for Tailgate has subsided now that the kool aid has been cleansed from his system:

We’ve seen transactional banners previously and they haven’t taken the world by storm; mediaFORGE’s emphasis on widgets marries existing concepts (and campaigns) into banner ads so they may have better luck in carving out a market.

Such a shame. Duncan’s revolutions never seem to come to fruition. He is like the Web 2.0 version of Paul Revere. Unfortunately, Joseph Warren never shows up.