Unilever PLC is making the stretch. The Anglo-Dutch consumer-products titan is trying to determine whether home computers are a potentially viable showcase for the hundreds of TV ads it creates every year. The company spends about $3.6 billion a year to advertise its 970 brands - including such household names as Lipton soup, Wisk detergent and Hellmann's mayonnaise - around the world.

The new effort begins in May with the digital versions of TV ads for Salon Selectives hair-care products (from WPP Group's J Walter Thompson/Chicago agency) featured at a site run by Amicada Inc., a Fort Lee, N.J., start-up that delivers full-frame, full-motion video for clients. It plans to place the Unilever ads on Internet portals and lure Web surfers to watch them with incentives, such as promotional prizes and rewards.

Unilever plans to expand the arrangement with Amicada to include the television spots for its Calvin Klein cosmetics and fragrances (created by the in-house agency called CRK) and, if the experiment is successful, will place other ads on popular portals.

Some observers are skeptical. Mr Dan Rank, managing partner in the national TV group at Omnicom Group Inc.'s OMD, which places more than $3 billion in ads on behalf of hundreds of advertisers, says showing TV commercials online is far from a sure bet. He says the low click-through rate on banner ads - those ubiquitous strips across the top of Web pages - is proof that Web surfers are likely to avoid advertisements if they can.

"The only reason people watch TV ads in the first place is because of the programmes" shown on TV networks and cable stations, he says. As funny or eye-catching as some TV ads might be, even they probably aren't compelling enough to keep people engaged online.

Mr Rank adds: "I can't see anyone clicking on a TV ad to get more information."

Unilever, which now uses Internet banners, admits it has yet to figure out how to best reach consumers on the Web. Unlike TV ads, which viewers can only escape by changing channels or leaving the room, the Web is a "permission-based marketing environment" with easily ignored advertising, says Mr Eric Siebert, director of interactive marketing for Unilever's North American Interactive Brand Center, a newly created unit whose role is to explore new advertising technologies.

Unilever has already experimented with Excite At Home to show commercials in a high-speed "broadband" environment. But very few people have computers that include broadband technology.

The Salon Selective Internet experiment will feature its existing TV ads, digitised, in a full-action narrowband environment. Because a file of the ads is delivered to the home computers of people who agree to see them, viewers can watch the ad at any time, even when they are writing or checking e-mail, or working offline. "We aren't creating brand-new commercials, we are taking existing creative spots," Mr Siebert says.

The Salon Selectives ads are part of a big new TV campaign for the hair products, set to break this spring. The campaign shows how unexpected objects can provide women with ideas on how to do their hair. (Previous versions featured women getting inspiration for their hairstyles from a cactus) The tagline: "See it. Do it."Unilever's experiment comes at a time when Web advertising is in a crisis.

Faced with tight ad budgets and a difficult economic outlook, and fed up with the limitations of the banner ad, more marketers are opting to stick with traditional advertising media like TV, radio and magazines.

That could all change if the Unilever experiment proves successful: The Web could ultimately represent a whole new channel for showing TV spots - and one that is far less expensive than buying 30 seconds of time on network or cable TV. Companies that have spent a couple of million dollars developing a TV spot could put it on the Web with little additional cost.

Unilever ultimately hopes to add a messaging feature to its digital commercials that will let it query the viewers about which ads they like, and which they hate.

"By taking this traditional TV communication form and putting it online, we want to understand what it takes to get people's attention online," Mr Siebert says. "We know what works when people are sitting on the living-room couch watching TV. But does the Internet require us to alter the commercial message?"

The Wall Street Journal