Google has announced the launch of a brand new display ad format they call Lightbox.

This is an interactive advertising box. It starts as a regular display ad and is designed to activate when a user hovers over it for two seconds.

Google said:

We’re introducing our lightbox ad format, the first of a new family of display ads that allow marketers to pay only when a user engages. The lightbox starts as a standard display ad, making it scalable, but after a two-second hover, expands to a super-sized canvas. In internal tests, we’ve seen that this smart hover feature eliminates nearly 100% of accidental expansions and increases engagement by 6-8X over standard click-to-expand ads.