So say Web publishers who have been running supersized, don’t-you-dare-look-away-from-me ads for the past year.

Even better, the ad sellers insist–they have scientific proof to back up their claim.

That comes via industry trade group Online Publishers Association, which commissioned a cool/creepy test: Monitor Web surfers’ eye movements and emotional responses when they encounter giant ad units like the “XXL” and the “Pushdown.” The study placed surfers in front of sites like the New York Times and showed them big ads from the likes of Microsoft’s Bing.

Short version of the conclusion: Put a really big ad in front of someone, and they’ll notice it.

“They have stopping power,” in the words of OPA president Pam Horan.

Longer take:

• 96 percent of surfers in the study looked at the giant ads when they showed up onscreen.
• 67 percent of surfers looked at the giant ads during the first 10 seconds they visited a Web page, then came back and looked at them again.
• Surfers who looked at giant ads after spending more than 10 seconds on a Web page “generated a stronger emotional response” to the ads than to the stuff on the rest of the page.
• Surfers liked the ads, giving them a 6.3 ranking out of a possible 9.

No need to tell you how much salt to use when reading research, commissioned by people who sell advertising, that concludes that advertising works. Still, this is interesting stuff. At the very least, you’ll want to skim through the report, embedded below.

For starters, it includes cool/creepy descriptions of the “biometric research” that research firm Innerscope performed for the OPA, which involves contraptions like the ones pictured on the left.

But more broadly, it gives you a sense of what Web publishers are trying to avoid: Advertising that most surfers have learned to ignore after years of training. (Except for Google’s search results ads–they love those, which is why Google posted $2 billion in profits last quarter).

On the other hand, the study doesn’t tell you how the new gigantosorous ads perform compared to run-of-the-mill Web ads. And most important, it doen’t attempt to figure out what marketers most want to know: Whether the new ads–or any Web display ads–actually help them move product.

That one has gone unanswered for 16 years, but it may still be some time before we get an answer.

OPA_AdUnitResearch_Final

You can see what Denton is up to by visiting his “beta” sites, which are open to the public: beta.gawker.com, beta.deadspin.com, etc.

Check out the difference between Gawker.com’s current homepage and the beta version and you’ll get the basic gist: Instead of a river of stories floating down the middle of the page, there’s one big one, a couple of secondary ones and then a menu bar linking to the rest of the site.

But if you really want to see where Denton is headed, make sure you find one of his pages featuring super-sized art. You can get a sense from these screenshots (click to enlarge), but it’s really best to visit the individual pages, where you’ll see that these images take up the full width of your screen:

This is where Denton wants to end up: stories–and ads–that fill up your screen. Sound familiar?

“Web media needs to move to TV metaphor–with full-screen imagery and other content interrupted with full-screen ads,” he tells me via email.  “Everything right now is so, um, bitty.”

Which is funny, because Denton’s last redesign shrank lots of elements on the page so he could cram more stuff in. You’ll still see evidence of it today on his sites, with the occasional headline-only story. And if you look around the blogosphere, you’ll find plenty of people following suit. (Even All Things D has introduced something we’re calling a “newsbyte.”)

But plenty of Web-ad sellers have been pushing super-sized stuff for some time now–see the ginormous ad units that the Online Publishers Association pushed out last year or Yahoo’s (YHOO) transformation of its login page.

And in the last few months I’ve seen a new ad unit on Huffington Post and Business Insider that fills my entire screen with a short video ad before sending me along to my “free content.” Just like, um, TV.

So Denton is either on to something here or maybe even a little bit behind the curve. That can’t be right, can it?

The above is an article of faith among a certain kind of Web publisher. And some of them are even paying for studies to prove that display ads–basically all the ads you see that aren’t part of search results–really do work on the Web.

Except when they don’t. That’s the unsettling conclusion that some research funded by Yahoo (YHOO) recently reached, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

The study was produced by the Web giant’s Yahoo Labs, which has been getting new attention in the Carol Bartz regime and beefing up its staff of social scientists by “adding highly credentialed cognitive psychologists, economists and ethnographers from top universities around the world.”

One of the new hires, economics professor David Reiley, tried to track the benefits of a Yahoo ad campaign on behalf of a retail chain. He found that the ads did work, but only for people born before Woodstock:

The research, conducted in partnership with an undisclosed national retailer, sought to accurately measure the impact of Internet display advertising across online and offline sales, by tracking people who had registered with both Yahoo and the store. The research found an approximately 5 percent increase in spending among those who had seen the ads–with 93 percent of those sales occurring in stores.

The potentially worrisome thing, however, was that among those under 40, the percentage was nearly zero. That could reflect the unpopularity of the particular retailer among that demographic. Or it could underscore a growing immunity to display advertising among the Web-savvy younger generation.

Yikes. I asked Yahoo for its take on the study and the company sent me a (not surprisingly) sunnier summary of the research. Some of its highlights:

Major Findings:
By combining a controlled experiment with panel data on purchases, we find statistically and economically significant impacts of advertising on sales.

We estimate the total effect on revenues to be more than eleven times the retailer’s expenditure on advertising during the study.
93% of the effect was on offline (in store) sales.

Persistence: The effects of the campaigns were persistent over time, meaning that the sales impact could be tracked for a period of time after the campaign ended.

Demographics: there was no significant correlation or differences w/r/t location (by state) or gender.

But there was a significant difference w/r/t to age: customers over the age of 40 were significantly more responsive to the ads in terms of sales. The largest effect came from senior citizens (65+).

Clicks versus non-Clicks: Though clicks are a standard measure of performance in online-advertising, we find that online advertising has substantial effects on those who merely view but do not click the ads.

We find that 78% of the effect in sales comes from those who view ads but do not click them, while only 22% can be attributed to those who click.

Count me among the group disposed to think that brand ads on the Web do work, by the way. But then again, I have a vested interest in this being true since it’s what’s supposed to keep me clothed and fed. I’d hate to see scientific proof that it’s all a pipe dream.

For a contrary perspective, funded by people whose interests align with mine, check out this study funded by the Online Publishers Association.

[Image credit: pedrosimoes7]

Some sites, like Discovery’s Planet Green, have already been playing around with the new OPA ads, but if you haven’t seen them yet, you can do it with a little bit of imagination. Think of a traditional Web ad as the equivalent of a yard sign. The new ones are billboards.

Like your descriptions more literal? Here’s the technical description of the new formats. By way of comparison, the column of text you’re reading now is 350 pixels wide.

The Fixed Panel: 336 wide x 700 tall, remains constant as the user scrolls to the top and bottom of the page.
The XXL Box: 468 wide x 648 tall, opens for seven seconds to 936 wide x 648 tall with 1/24x frequency.
The Pushdown: 970 wide x 418 tall, opens to display the advertisement and then after seven seconds, rolls up to 970 wide x 66 tall, with 1/24x frequency.

And um, here’s what a really big ad might look like on your desktop (click to enlarge).

If you’re knee-deep in the online advertising business, you’ll be interested in why these ad formats are being pushed by the Online Publishers Association instead of the better-known Interactive Advertising Bureau. I have heard some baroque/petty descriptions of squabbling between the two groups, whose membership overlaps but isn’t identical. But maybe we’ll come back to that some other time.

For now, let’s see if these deliver as advertised–that is, whether they get marketers to spend more money on the Web, without just plowing the money into Google (GOOG).

That’s because the Online Publishers Association, one of the Web ad industry’s main trade groups, is rolling out a new series of in-your-face ad units–standardized blocks of space that Web publishers and advertisers favor because they make it easy to mass-produce marketing messages.

The new standards are meant to combat “banner blindess”–our collective, unconscious and successful efforts to block out and ignore most Web advertising.

ClickZ has the details, but the key point is that the ads are going to be ginormous and gaudy–think monster trucks with sirens and flashing lights. The numbers they’re referring to in the quotation below are pixels; by way of comparison, the column of text you’re reading now is about 350 pixels wide:

“Among the new units being debuted are: the ‘fixed panel,’ a 336 x 860 panel that looks embedded into the page and scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as the user scrolls; the ‘XXL Box,’ which is 468 x 648 and allows users to actually turn ‘pages’ and watch video; and the ‘pushdown,’ which is 970 x 428 which opens to display a nearly full-page ad and then rolls up to the top of the page.”

The reasonable thing to point out here is that there’s nothing that prohibits advertisers and publishers from doing interesting and creative stuff with these formats–just like Apple (AAPL). And if you’re really lucky, you’ll find that the ads are even about stuff you’re interested in learning about. That’s the key, remember, to Google’s (GOOG) success (and note how unobtrusive most of Google’s ads are).

But if the ads aren’t interesting and aren’t relevant to you? It’s the kind of thing that could drive a mild-mannered person to install ad-blocking software.

If you want to see this stuff live, keep your eyes peeled at sites run by ESPN, the New York Times, MTV and Condé Nast Digital, which are among the 24 publishers that have agreed to start running at least one of the ad units by July.