Way back in the dark ages of 1994, when the web was still in its infancy, Wired Magazine ran the world’s first online banner ad. It was a revelation, changing the way we think about advertising. Fast forward two decades, and the web has become so saturated with banners that it feels like the digital equivalent of Times Square.
In 2012 alone there were 5.3 trillion ads shown online, and the number is still growing. These days everyone has banner ads on their site – from your aunt’s blog about poodles to some of the most visited properties on the web. Hell, even BOM is starting to do it. But with so many ads out there, is traditional display advertising still even effective? There are so many possibilities to do cool things on the web – so why are we all restricting ourselves to a 300×250 box of moving text and image?
Now don’t get me wrong – I work in digital. If display ads disappeared off the web overnight I’d be out of a job. But spending so long looking at banners every day means I’m at least semi-qualified to be able to say that banner ads as they are today are often aren’t as imaginative or effective as some other executions. No-one has quite got the formula right just yet; despite Facebook’s enormous user base and ability to target down to the level of people who like Windows 98, they’ve famously struggled to work out how best to advertise to their billion-strong user base.
To add fuel to the fire, last year some enterprising folks at Adage decided they’d undertake an experiment where they served half a million impressions of completely blank banner ads. The result? An above average click-through rate of 0.08%. Then a ComScore study suggested that a third of ads delivered are never even seen by users. And of course there’s the issue that anyone smart enough installs ad blocking filters on their browser anyway, meaning they’re not seeing banner ads at all.
Before you start suggesting that maybe I should start finding another job, there is hope. There have been some promising new developments in digital advertising recently. The advent of promoted tweets on twitter has seen positive results so far, even if it’s early days yet. Promoted tweets work well because the content is (usually) engaging and doesn’t blatantly push a product in people’s faces. Users on twitter are also much more used to seeing unfamiliar profiles in their timeline because of retweeting anyway. Foursquare and Facebook allow businesses to give away offers to those who check-in or like their page. There are some really cool executions in tablet advertising as well, but for the moment it’s still very niche.
And then there’s Buzzfeed. The meme-tastic start-up is being touted as the being the first company to truly crack the digital business model. We’ve all heard of branded content, but Buzzfeed is unique in that it doesn’t run banner advertising. Instead it has a growing list of companies who sponsor posts and create their own lists. While in different hands the site could easily have been flooded with ’24 of the best McDonalds Hamburgers’ lists, founder Jonah Peretti only has two rules: that the content is interesting for the site’s audience, and that it is inherently shareable. A bunch of brands have jumped on the bandwagon, most prominently Virgin Mobile. Earlier this year their post ’15 of the dirtiest pictures on the internet’ garnered over 100,000 page views in under a week (it’s not what you think). News websites who currently see advertorial as opening the gates to hell could learn a lot from Buzzfeed.
I’m not saying banner ads should disappear completely. In some situations, like direct-response campaigns where users can transact directly after clicking on the ad, they continue to work really well. The digital landscape is constantly changing and evolving. It’s time that banner ads did as well.
Will Dawson
Digital Assistant
MediaCom