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).

The Steve Jobs health story takes yet another twist, this time a happier one: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Apple CEO underwent a liver transplant earlier this spring and is recovering from the operation.

Jobs, who stepped away from day-to-day management of his company in January, is still expected to return to work later this month, the Journal said.

The transplant, which the Journal says Jobs received “about two months ago,” may be related to a form of pancreatic cancer that the Apple (AAPL) CEO has been living with since 2003. In 2005, Jobs declared that he was “fine,” but the state of his health, or lack thereof, has been the subject of recurring speculation for years.

That reached a fever pitch during the past 12 months, spurred on by his unusually gaunt appearance at Apple’s 2008 Worldwide Developers Conference. Apple officials originally said Jobs was suffering from a “common bug.”

In January, following Jobs’s announcement that he was receiving treatment for a “nutritional problem” stemming from a hormonal imbalance, Bloomberg reported that he was considering a liver transplant.

Jobs’s response: “Why don’t you guys leave me alone–why is this important?”

The Journal says that Jobs, who was supposed to come back to work full-time by the end of this month, may ease into the role and that COO Tim Cook, who has been running the company day to day in his absence, may get more responsibility.

But the paper also says Jobs has been back to the company’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters:

“During his leave, Mr. Jobs has remained involved in key aspects of the company and reviewed products and product plans from home. He has also been seen at Apple’s headquarters, according to people who have seen him there.”

While Squires solves that riddle, he’ll leave his day job as head of the “news business unit” (Time, Fortune, Money, etc.). In his place will be… Moore, who is already running the company’s style group.

I chatted briefly via email with Squires, who is good-natured about the assignment. But I have to take issue with him (and everyone else who uses this example) re iTunes. Apple (AAPL) didn’t prove that people are willing to pay for content online–we’d already seen that (at The Wall Street Journal, among other examples). Apple proved that people are willing to pay for portions–that would be songs–of products that were previously only sold in bundles–that would be CDs.

You can debate whether this was terrible for the music industry or simply the least-bad option. But I don’t think it makes sense to compare the experience of the music industry with news and other Web content that people aren’t used to paying for in any form.

Here’s my Q&A with Squires:

MediaMemo: I’m struck by Ann’s “genie” reference–are we meant to take that in a tongue-in-cheek way, or do you folks really think you can put the free-content genie back in the bottle? Or am I misinterpreting that?

John Squires: We’re not unrealistic about the challenge, but iTunes showed people will pay for something attractively packaged and fairly priced that they once got for free….We also wanted to get your attention. So I guess we’re genies.

MM: Do you imagine that Time Inc. will be taking content that’s currently available for free online and putting it behind a pay wall? Or are you more focused on creating new products you can charge for?

JS: This is part of what we’ll be testing. Certainly some online content will remain free because we’re eager to keep our large online audiences (over 26 million Nielsen uniques) and successful advertising model. Some other online content may be subscription-based. And the content we create for mobile readers will be a completely new experience, with different design and functions that we think consumers will want to pay for.

MM: Haven’t heard Time Inc.’s voice in the “Google isn’t playing fair” chorus. How much, if any, energy are you spending on getting the search engine to help you/take less from you, etc.?

JS: We’re not part of that chorus at the moment.

MM: Is this a permanent assignment or will you go back to News at some point?

JS: We’ll see what comes out of this assignment.

And here’s the companywide memo from Moore:

To:       Time Inc. Employees

From:   Ann Moore

Re: How to Put the Genie Back Into the Bottle; Special Assignment for John Squires

It won’t be a revelation to any of you that the publishing business is changing rapidly. While print magazines are not going away, and while we have built vibrant websites with over 26 million unique visitors and 750 million pages views each month, it’s increasingly clear that finding the right digital business model is crucial for the future of our business. We need to develop a strategy for the portable digital world and to refine our views on paid content.

Given the magnitude of the opportunity, I have asked John Squires to take on a new role and devote his full time efforts this summer to developing the best business plan for the future. John’s qualifications for this assignment are ideal. He has a strong background in consumer marketing and digital content and has stature in the publishing industry, as well as with digital software and hardware companies. It is likely we will be seeking partners and allies in our quest to ‘put the genie back into the bottle’.

As many of you know, we are currently pursuing four related initiatives:

1.    Evolving our current website businesses by identifying and developing consumer revenue streams.

2.    Accelerating the creation of applications for smartphone platforms.

3.    Developing new products and business models for portable digital readers.

4.    Exploring partnerships with other publishers to develop the optimal retail store for our digital products.

John will need the support of many, including Consumer Marketing, Legal, Strategy and Business Development, and the Time Inc. titles. Please pitch in with all your resources available when he calls.

During this assignment, similar to the role I’m playing at the Style and Entertainment Group, I will assume responsibility for the News Business Unit.

A.M.

We’ll find out once the reported deal becomes official, which could happen as early as Friday. In the meantime, you can consider the varied opinions of antitrust attorneys and experts quoted in The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

Or you can just ask the Boss, who gives the deal an unqualified thumbs down.

The story: Bruce Springsteen happens to be embarking on yet another megatour (perhaps you caught him on TV the other day). Said tour, which is using Ticketmaster (TKTM) to sell tickets (again, like just about everyone else in the concert business) has already run into a snafu involving TicketsNow, the “secondary marketplace” (i.e., legal aftermarket/scalping) company Ticketmaster bought last year.

If you want the details, you can consult Springsteen’s Web site, where the musician and manager Jon Landau have posted a long apology. Or you can cut to the chase:

The one thing that would make the current ticket situation even worse for the fan than it is now would be Ticketmaster and Live Nation coming up with a single system, thereby returning us to a near monopoly situation in music ticketing. Several newspapers are reporting on this story right now. If you, like us, oppose that idea, you should make it known to your representatives.

The abuse of our fans and our trust by Ticketmaster has made us as furious as it has made many of you. We will continue to do our utmost now and in the future to make sure that these practices are permanently curtailed on our tours.”

And that’s the thing: There are plenty of companies Americans enjoy disliking, but most of them have some kind of lobby and political clout to help shrug off that animus. But just about anyone who’s bought a concert ticket has at some point cursed Ticketmaster for some kind of perceived slight or insult. And unlike banks, oil, health care or any of our favorite bugaboos, it’s hard to argue that ticket brokers perform some crucial function in our economy, so we have to put up with it.

Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff is one shrewd dude. But he’s going to have to be awfully persuasive to find people in Washington willing to back this one when it gets to Washington.

Attention New York publishers and advertisers!!!

Those people pestering you to vote for “Roi Asap” today? They’re not working for a real candidate!

This warning comes to you from a MySpace worker bee, who is up in arms about a promotional stunt from the MySpace ad sales team.

“Roi,” you see, is a semi-clever pun based on a term MySpace ad chief Jeff Berman used in a press release promoting the targeting technology last month (as in, “Return On Investment”).

MySpace is supposed to hire dozens of fake campaign workers to push Roi/advertising targeting today at midtown offices in Manhattan.

I don’t see the problem here. But the MySpace employee thinks the fake vote-soliciting is “ridiculous” and wants it “exposed.” Okay, done.

More interesting will be quarterly earnings call from MySpace owner, News Corp., on Wednesday afternoon, and what CEO Rupert Murdoch has to say about his prize Web property’s recent performance.

News Corp. (NWS) earnings calls are always entertaining, but Wednesday’s call should be more intriguing than most. It will be the first time Murdoch has sounded off in a public forum, since the economy went into free-fall.

Murdoch had already sounded the alarm bells last spring. And, at the D: All Things Digital conference in May, he predicted that the U.S. would be in an 18-month recession.

More recently, during the company’s August earnings call, he said that local television ads had fallen off a cliff. (News Corp., owner of Dow Jones, is also the owner of this Web site.)

But even as Murdoch has predicted gloomy times for some of his company’s assets, he and his execs have talked up the prospects of MySpace. During the last call, News Corp. COO Peter Chernin said Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. Web unit dominated by MySpace, would be able to increase revenues by 30 percent during the coming year.

Predicting FIM revenues has proved tricky for News Corp., which had to publicly back down last spring from a promise it had made in the summer of 2007. And now that Web advertisers are finally admitting that they’re seeing weakness, that 30 percent may be difficult to achieve too.

Given that the year-ago quarter was underwhelming, and that the last quarter covers the July to September period–most of which was catastrophe-free–there’s a good chance FIM will report in-line ad sales on Wednesday.

But pay attention to whether Murdoch and Chernin are able to reiterate past projections for the rest of the year.

I’m told that the ad-targeting technology MySpace is pushing is indeed boosting revenue at the site. And the video plans the company announced yesterday are interesting as well: An automated ID program will let publishers like Viacom (VIA) unit MTV Networks automatically place ads on user-uploaded content that they own.

Google’s (GOOG) YouTube announced something similar earlier this year.

But those programs only work at the margins of MySpace’s business, and are long-term plays. The most important part is getting big advertisers to buy big campaigns on MySpace’s prime real estate.

Such as its homepage, where a one-day campaign was going for an average of $500,000 earlier this year, and where particularly intrusive campaigns could garner $1,000,000 for 24 hours.

If those rates are softening, then it won’t matter how innovative the company is in the near term: It’s going to have to reset expectations.