Ban the banner
By David MacGregor,
There's a place where the world's garbage collects. No—two places.
Advertising
There is a monumental swirling mass of waterborne toxic plastic and debris called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It offers me a visual metaphor for the internet, though of course the internet is bigger. We've developed an infinite ability to create crap and find a place to leave it so that we can conveniently ignore it, or selectively see what we want amid the mess.
Take advertising. It's been elevated to an art form in many media; advertising is sometimes enjoyed more than the content it pays for. But online promotional activity is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of the advertising business. Banners, buttons and 'skyscrapers' pollute content sites with their insistent flickering.
One of the problems with this form of advertising is that clicking a banner or button links you to another place on the web, and not always to a useful or nice place. So I stick with the content I sought out and ignore the siren calls of neurotic touts. Like many consumers I have developed banner blindness. I don't even see the messages.
Not only does banner blindness lead to pathetically low click-through rates, but it does nothing to enhance the reputation of digital advertising or the brands that use it. The artistry in the best television or print advertising can't be supported in the junk market. Why assign a creative budget to a throw-away? What self-respecting creative talent wants to produce clutter that simply swirls around in the sinkhole of the web?
The artistry in the best television or print advertising can't be supported in the junk market. Why assign a creative budget to a throw-away? What self-respecting creative talent wants to produce clutter that simply swirls around in the sinkhole of the web?
Maybe Apple's entry into the advertising fray with iAd will change things a little in the mobile arena. Its product cleverly addresses the fundamental flaw of banner advertising on the web by allowing the user to remain within the application they are using. This interstitial form of advertising is similar to an ad break on television (though with the added function of allowing the ad to be closed) and, like television advertising, the ads can be used to fund free content and applications because Apple will share 60 percent of the value of the ad with the developers who embed the code into their apps. On the other side of the ledger, Apple also offers a creation service where, for US$50,000 or more, it will produce an interactive experience for your brand that will suit the format—to Apple's high aesthetic standard.
Attracting attention with flashing, flickering doodads on the web is the lowest form of advertising (matched only in the real world by ugly, intrusive billboards that appear without invitation or any relevance). It's little wonder they are ignored, but still they hover and lurk ineffectually: visual spam.
Maybe the rise of search as a marketing tool will bring about the demise of junk banner advertising. Directing visitors to online experiences that are specific and relevant makes much more sense than cheap, random, in-your-face intrusion. Creating brand experiences delivered online that people will talk about and share on Facebook and Twitter will also be more and more significant. Human curation and recommendation will trump a nasty hawker's pitch every time.
Comments
Richard Ram
NZ publishers and advertisers need to rethink what they are doing and not be so lazy.
Publishers need to be able to offer contextual banner ad placement (some already do, and it’s not that hard), they need to allow advertisers to create 100’s of ads at a more granular level of context and quickly traffic these.
Agencies need to develop banner ad management systems which allow ads to be created quickly and cheaply and integrate these with publishing systems to allow for rapid deployment. Publishers need to allow this to happen and automate trafficking systems.
Advertisers need to create landing pages which are relevant to the banner ads and not dump those who have clicked onto an irrelevant page and expect the visitor to look for what to do next. When did you see well designed and written landing page?
Media buyers need to buy relevant media and not trot out the same old schedule for every campaign, they need to review how a media buy has performed and then adjust to optimise results.
Matt Cooney
Good points Richard. Though I'm pleased to see that all the banner ads on this page go to well-designed and relevant landing pages (when David filed his copy, I was thinking the Steinlager campaign is a great counter-example. I wish there were more.)
Alister Coyne
As a creative working exclusively in digital I find that online advertising is the 'arse end' of a campaign. Too often a traditional Creative Director or Art Director will say, “we just want it the same as the print ad”, which immediately negates the opportunity to create something unique for the space.
I recently spoke to photographers at Image Nation about the disparity between photography and the digital media. Photography in advertising has always been about the still image, in digital it's all about the moving image.
I put together a presentation that shows just how digital is treated, which explains for all those appalling crap banners we see.
You can see the animation here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqFWBfKTlnk
Fundamentally I think the online advertising model is flawed. It should be contextual, engaging, thoughtful and playful. Much like the medium it exists in.
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