The Risk of Banner Ads

As we know, paid search and banner ads make up the majority of digital marketing spend. When you’re paying for your brand to be placed in front of online consumers, there’s a certain amount of risk you have to take into account based on where that ad is placed and what content it appears beside. While you can block your ad from appearing on webpages featuring certain words by using keyword block lists along with your ad, what do you do when something like an insurrection on the capitol happens and everywhere is flooded with bad news? Many brands simply pulled their ads from appearing anywhere. Which makes sense, but is costly to both the brands advertising (because of the manpower to cancel the ads) and the brands for which depend on the advertising money. In addition to being costly, the reactionary culture that is being created is detrimental to strategy and planning. While I agree you shouldn’t promote your ad for saving money with Honey when the Times is reporting on a national emergency, there must be a better way to create stopgaps to prevent this from happening. 

In her article “Brand Safety Shouldn’t Be Reactionary – Advertisers Need To Do Better,” Allison Schiff discusses this phenomenon and refers to a report from IAB in saying that “consumers are 45% more likely to visit a brand’s website if that brand advertises on their favorite news outlets and that advertising in the news can actually increase consumer trust by 6%.” This shows that banner ads, specifically, do what they’re supposed to. How then, can we alleviate the risk involved? In her article, she goes on to discuss the idea of viewing your brand safety as “shades of gray rather than through the lens of a blocklist” and utilizing “brand suitability” when considering the placement of ads. Considering brand suitability in ad placements is a good first step, but what can come next? Are we just forced to continue watching and updating keyword lists in a reactionary fashion? What do you think?

Citi Partners with Zillow in Digital Marketing Push

In a move that proves that good old fashioned targeting and strategic marketing alliances are not old hat for digital marketers, Citi has partnered with Zillow. This new marketing move will push Citi ads to StreetEasy and Zillow users and will promote the Citi brand and deals to certified preapproved buyers. 

• This tidbit definitely made me wonder whether other similar partnerships between banks and vendors might arise in the near future. There is potential for valuable ad partnerships for banks with car companies, large retail chains with lay away programs, even with behemoth vendors such as Amazon or shopping aggregators like ShopStyle. All of these would provide the equivalent of qualified leads to the banks and would have many of the benefits of SEO, most importantly the value gleaned from knowing the site visitors' intent. These partnerships could be very valuable and boast much better conversion rates than ordinary banner advertising....

http://www.nationalmortgagenews.com/news/origination/citi-launches-digital-marketing-push-with-zillow-1044113-1.html

The Future of the Banner Ad on it's 20th Birthday

The banner ad has long been a familiar sight to online users. However, with Google's announcement of full-screen mobile ads and Facebook's full-screen mobile formats, will smaller format banner ads stick around for long? Google and Facebook have a combined two-thirds of the global mobile advertising share and only promise to grow, so an obvious trend emerges. Here are a few reasons why traditional banner ads, particularly on mobile, will likely lose way in the near future: 1. Banner formats are too small when viewed on a small screen. 2. Existing evidence shows that bigger banner ad formats work better (with increases over 10x CTRs with ad size increases). 3. Active formats can offer more insight on user engagement; smaller banner ads don't produce videos or moving ads as well.

In Google's case, new ad formats include full-screen interstitials, engagement format ads (ad offers an invitation to expand to full-screen view), and anchor ads that stay on the screen even when the user scrolls down. Facebook has also demonstrated the evolution of banner ads with their native ads in the news feed. More and more are moving toward video-format. All-in-all, the big players are shifting mobile advertising strategies and the rest of the world will need to follow.

In other news today, Obama supports Net Neutrality! More on this topic next week.

Source: VentureBeat; BusinessInsider

the mini-cooper isn't getting any bigger.

In the WSJ today, a brief article about how the advertising "pie" online isn't getting any bigger, and that any business seeking to be supported by web advertising would do well to keep that in mind. Writes Martin Peers,

"The Internet-ad business is a little like a Mini Cooper. There is a limit to the number of people who can squeeze inside... Yet newspapers, magazines and TV outlets are each vying with Web-only concerns for a piece of the action... Oversupply of inventory could be particularly brutal for pricing."

Peers cites a statistics showing that from 2006 to 2008, ad spending on traditional media "dropped 4.8%, or $6.7 billion, to 1.32.2 billion," while ad spending on the internet rose by $6.6 billion, nearly the same amount. Suffering the greatest erosion in ad revenue: traditional media like newspapers. David Carr writes in the New York Times that the paper lost $74.5 million in the first quarter of 2009 in advertising revenue - and this includes an 8% decline in internet ad revenue.

As a journalist, I am well aware that my industry is in the midst of a full-scale panic right now about this loss of revenue, and how migrating to an internet-based ad revenue model will irrevocably alter the business model of journalism and how newsrooms fund their work. The oft-repeated phrase is that moving traditional media online is the equivalent of trading "analog dollars for digital pennies." Newspapers are attempting different advertising models that mostly involve different points of insertions of advertising in their content - between a link and an article, for example, as Forbes and Salon.com do.

The New York Times recently introduced a prominent two-banner display on its homepage, just below the masthead and above any of its breaking news stories. For the most part, this main banner ad is thankfully not of the flashing, tacky variety - but the presence of a single Apple logo dominating a quarter of the horizontal space and propping up both sides of the lead story is, at least to me, a little disconcerting. I'm under no illusions that the news isn't a business, but the prominence of advertising surrounding the content, like a moat -- look, it troubles me.

And yet, as Carr writes, even though this new huge homepage banner is enormous, the Apple banner ad doesn't even come close to replacing the Tiffany ad that traditionally runs in page three of the physical newspaper every day (It's had that spot for a hundred years!). The banner ad brings in far less money, and, as Carr writes,

"Until our digital model finds a way to create a similar kind of exalted placement, it will be tough to charge the kind of prices for advertising that reflect the cost of producing quality content."

It is also all the more apparent now that newspapers - accustomed to being the role of displaying the marketing output of their advertisers - must find a way to also market themselves online - to establish a presence in online communities and networks and through email marketing with their subscribers and readers - methods of communicating with media consumers that, for the most part, newspapers are simply not used to doing... and it has been taking publishers a long time to wrap their heads around the notion that news is now an ongoing multiple-front conversation, not a wire distribution service.

In other news, emarketer reports that banner advertising gets a bum rap for being annoying and ineffective, even though it seems that click-through rates are down - while 31% of respondents in a survey reported clicking on ads, ad viewers responded in other ways: by going to the advertising company's website directly, by seraching for information about the company, or even by looking around for information about the company through social networks or message boards. It seems banner ads may end up with the desired end - ad viewers become aware of the company and may even go on their own to find out about the company - but they're bypassing that click.