Landing on the ESPN homepage today I was served a beautiful,
“full bleed” video intensive, evidently custom ad, that canvased most of my
laptop screen. After a 15 second play, the ad collapsed, and my usual ESPN
homepage user experience resumed. I watched the full ad because it was relevant
and was served in a pleasant way that didn’t intrude on my ESPN experience.
The digital ad world has yet to evolve much from the
earliest versions of advertising formats, developed when website coding was in
its infancy. Since early HTML and Angelfire websites, web design has evolved
into much more striking visual appearance, made accessible to the masses by
major progress made by site-building services like Wordpress, Wix, and Adobe
among others. Within minutes, an amateur can have a website built that looks
like it belongs in 2017, with beautiful user experience that translates well to
mobile and the remaining tablets out there.
Yet given an option to “monetize” their site, the site
builder will pull in a network, usually Google, to serve ad creative that hasn’t
changed at all since the infancy of the internet. Appearing awkwardly on the bottom
of a glossy new website is typically a standard “banner” ad, usually static,
that sits awkwardly on a web design that befits its time period. And these
standard banners still comprise the bulk of internet advertising.
This gap in progress between web design, and ad unit incorporation,
has resulted in a significant breakdown of digital advertising. The industry
will recover once the use of standard banners has hit rock bottom, and networks
become capable of running beautiful, video based ads that cover nearly the
whole screen but don’t interrupt user experience, in a way similar to the
aforementioned ESPN ad (which is clearly a custom job). The industry will
evolve to mimic television advertising more than standard display advertising –
large video units will proliferate as broadband access becomes cheaper and more
accessible, and advertisers will come full circle back to video as being their
primary advertising medium, as it was before the internet.
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