Subscribers

I’ve been sitting on this post for a while, considering how to weigh in. I think I always knew what I was going to say, but wasn’t sure if it should be said. Then I realized I think most of us feel this way and it has been said before and will continue to be said – just not heard very often.

BANNER ADS SUCK. Call it display, web ads, whatever you want to call it, but at the end of the day with click through rates falling and a host of other more inventive ways to get your message on the web, they are just more noise than they are worth.

To effectively create a banner ad, you need to consider multiple things, placement on the page (i.e. please stop putting Calls to action at the bottom of skyscrapers.. you don’t see it unless you scroll – and really whose going to scroll to look at an ad? It’s not the reason you went to the website in the first place), audience, and even the website itself amongst other things.

Unless you know your media buyers ensured little to no duplication in terms of the number of units that might show up at once, you’ll want to make sure each format you have will be designed differently so that even though it’s the same message, you will have more chance of it being seen. Otherwise you’ll look like your product just wallpapered the site you’re on with one ad in three different sizes. Boring.

Getting your creative team, or agency to create ads like that, takes a lot of time and a lot of money. It’s not like a simple resize of a print ad, each ad unit needs to be created to its own spec and size. Seems like a lot of work for click trhough rates of 0.2-0.3% or lower (okay – or higher if you do more interactive ads, but then double the cost and time required to produce).

So then comes in the portls and sites who argue about the benefits of branding and the millions of eyeballs that saw your ad. But what if they didn’t? It used to be if your ad server indicated an impression served it meant that at the very least you had a potential eyeball.

Not any more – ad blockers are becoming more and more popular and should be becoming a big concern for advertisers, publishers, agencies and the industry in general.

According to an iMedia Connection article on this, more than 2.5 million people have already downloaded the AdBlock Plus plug in for the FireFox browser. It means that they can surf the web the way they want without any ads.

This should be a big concern for media buyers and advertisers who are forced into CPM buys. How do you know that you’re really paying for impressions that were truly served and not blocked? When determing response rate – how do you look at your CTR and determine if it’s truly accurate? What if 5-10% of your impressions were never served because of an ad blocker? That would change everything.

Personally, I think this is a good thing for the industry for a few reasons…

1. It will force publishers (especially some large major Canadian portals) to start lowering their CPM prices and look at other pricing models for advertisers.
2. It will force the industry to find new ways to measure banner ads and determine their effectiveness.
3. Publishers will be required to find new, more relevant ways of creating advertising and sponsorship packages in order to bring in the bacon from advertisers.
4. It will force advertisers and their agencies to be creative and to start looking beyond the banner ad and into things like content integration, social media and other relevant ways to reach their consumers and target audience online.