Banner Ads: Biggest Advertising Mistake Ever

While I know that the issue has been beat to death several times over, Charlie Hall of LinuxGram sent me a story from Silicon Alley Daily that's currently running concerning banner ads, and some editorial musings. The proposition of the editorial is good, but man, does interruption based advertising irritate me.

Comments

Banner Ads

[Skyshadow]

The thing about banner ads is that I'll occassionally see one for something I'm interested in or for a company I didn't realize had a web presence, but usually I'll just make a mental note and surf there myself when I'm in the mood to shop.

I wonder what would happen if companies started offering mild incentives to use the banners -- maybe I could get free shipping on my next DVD order at Reel.com if I clicked on the banner at Ebert's site or something.

Of course, since so many online retailers operate so close to the bottom line already, this may not be feasible.

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Re:Banner Ads

[Lemmy Caution]

What you've described is the classic model of print advertising. Advertising traditionally doesn't work by immediately creating a sale, it works by building a largely subconscious awareness of the brand and product that is being advertised, and associating that awareness with real (it works!) and imagined (it will make you popular, get you laid, and bring joy to your life!) benefits (also mostly subconciously.)

That click-through has become the metric of the success of online advertising is an unmitigated disaster for on-line publishing. In other domains, no one judges the success of print ads by the number of people who stop reading the magazine and rush to the phones, they judge success by the overall increase in business. Likewise, no one judges the success of billboards by how many cars veer off the freeway and head towards the advertiser's business, nor TV advertisement by how many people shut off the TV and run to the mall. However, that is exactly what is used to judge the viability of banner ads - it is expected to provide instant business, and advertisers are loathe to pay for online ad campaigns that don't have a next-click success.

Online publishers are partially to blame for this by promising the moon to their advertising customers, and by selling click-through instead of selling brand awareness. This may be fallout from the heady pre-bust days when no one worried about revenue, anyway - having big accounts (which produced no revenue) was seen as more important to attracting investors than the revenue stream was, so publishers would tell ad sales prospects that they wouldn't have to pay (much) unless there was a click through. Now, they are paying the price for that carelessness.

Re:Banner Ads

[MadAhab]

Thank god someone pointed this out. You are 150% correct that the problem was misstating the value of the product. I can't tell you how many Real Powerful Execs and hardass Ad Sales types I've heard complain about the fact that everything from web log analysis to banner ads was sold to them as the omniscient magic laser that would dispel the clouds of ignorance that lay over advertising for millenia.

Those clouds are mighty thick.

The clickthrough rate for billboards is 0.000000000000000000%. Neilsen statistics are barely better than educated guesswork, and often worse. I doubt anyone has non-voodoo statistics on the number of cars sold by a superbowl ad. I bet you'd have a hard time finding a magazine who got more dollars from advertisers if sales rose following the publication of the ad. More apropos, response rates on direct mail make banner ads look very effective, and even more so when you consider the cost, and companies still love them. The truly abysmal value of Spam hasn't kept it out of my inbox. But when was the last time you heard someone completely dismiss an entire arena of advertising?

Banner ads are a great tool, but they were sold incorrectly by people who didn't understand them at all to people who understood them even less. They are a great tool the same way as many forms of advertising; they are an important part of making household names out of companies and controlling, creating, and promoting an image that helps the company sell its product. Banner ads should be viewed in this context, not as a robot army of magical sales fairies who work for $0.10 a day.

The author of that article rightly criticizes the industry dweebs and ignoramuses who caused this mess, but he's not any better at understanding what the ads are for.

Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.

Banner ads aren't the worst, oh no.

[Enahs]

I mean, think about it. The author states that banner ads have a .2% click-through rate. In contrast,

-TV has 0% click-through.
-Radio has 0% click-through.
-Newspaper ads have 0% click-through.
-Magazine ads have 0% click-through.
-Billboards have 0% click-through.
-Transit advertising has 0% click-through.
-Direct mail (not email) has 0% click-through.

There you have it--based on click-through, banner ads are the most superior form of advertising! (NOTE: No, I'm not being an idiot, just making a statement on evaluating banner-ad effectiveness solely on click-through.)

Advertising?

[Stiletto]

"Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life." - Carl Lash 1978

People don't respond to normal advertising by mindlessly running out and buying things. Instead they become accustomed to the idea that buying things makes them happy. Why should online advertisers expect immediate returns (click-throughs) from advertising?

Lousy Banner Ad INTERPRETATION

[rkent]

Personally I'm sick of people like this who consider banner ads successful ONLY when people click through immediately! To me, that's a McDonald's manager saying "Gee, advertisin' bob, traffic through our drivethrough only increased 0.3% in the 5 minutes after our commercial was run... I don't think TV advertising works!"

People aren't used to interacting with advertisements. In fact, I'd go so far as to say people don't WANT to. It's always "yup, there's an ad, I'm going on with my day." When I get up to read the news, I don't WANT to go buy a car, I want to read the %$#@ news!

I wish they'd look at it more like print ads, where you could just buy space on a web page, and there was LOTS of space. I mean, the NYTims shouldn't try interstitials, but it SHOULD sell that 2/3 of the screen not filled by the column. That just makes sense. Then if you don't want to read the ads, shrink your browser; think of it as folding back half of the newsprint page :)

Real Link

[rkent]

Oops, looks like they rolled out tomorrow's edition already. Er, today's. Whatever. Click "previous issue," or click here.

Re:fair enough, but depressing

[rkent]

The NYTimes does not _need_ to advertise that heavily; it's shortsighted, greedy behavior and is akin to a sort of 'psychic pollution.'

Just for the record, yes they do. Any periodical does. That's how they survive. Take wired, for example. Just the print version, to simplify things. If you've every tried to publish a book or magazine yourself, you'd know that printing that many glossy pages and binding it that way costs at LEAST $3 per copy, and that's with a substantial volume discount. Yet they sell it for $1 to subscribers, and what? $4 on the newsstand? So there's no way they could ever, ever EVER subsist without "that many" ads. Just so you know.

Now, ad a website to that. Hell, might as well start talking about NYTimes now since that's the example in the article. The digital edition does not SAVE money because it does not directly eliminate the need for any particular printed copy. Plus there's additional overhead like syncing it up to the print edition, typical web admin duties, plus additional editors/columnists/photographers for special "online only" stories. And since they offer it FREE, it can only drain the main New York Times budget.

UNLESS, that is, they run more ads there. And actually persuade people to buy them.

So, your argument is really flawed. I don't think you're evil for skipping the ads, we all do, but don't say the papers don't NEED to run ads.

Paying for Content: A Conundrum

[nanojath]

It's good to see this discussion getting played out because it is opening a few eyes to a simple but generally ignored fact: The real customers of mass media. It isn't the viewer/reader/listener, in most cases: It's the advertiser. We are merely consumers, with someone else footing the bill. Sort of like Daddy buying you an ice cream cone, except usually doesn't harp on you to buy a truck or a taco afterwards.

Someone has to pay for content, of course. You can visit my site for free, with no more advertising than a line of text on the bottom giving a prop to the friend who hosts me. Then again, the content on my site hasn't changed for 3 months and arguably contains nothing but the semicoherent ravings of a lunatic.

So, you want games and frolics and pretty pictures that move and pretend to love you. So let's talk banner ads:

1. The article is right. Banner ads suck and everybody knows it. I pay heed to about one in a hundred if that. And as soon as I click away from that add, it's content is forgotten.

2. But an unstated problem is that a large percentage of banner advertisers are ill-conceived, cash-hemorrhaging dotcom fuckups, and who could tell if they could succeed even if they could get the internet to strap me down in a chair with Clockwork Orange eye-restraints and make me watch flash ads for hours on end?

3. And no doubt there's still plenty of room for the well-placed, well targetted banner ad (porn site ads on teaser pages, ferinstance, or Linux gear on /.)

So banner ads are probably not a thing of the past but let's get real: they can't pay for all the groovy content on the internet.

Now, let's talk interruption-based flash ads or whatever of the same ilk: it's not gonna work. The internet isn't like teeveee, you don't plop down in front of it to go passive for three hours. It's active, and there are just too many ways to ignore an interruption based ad. Take the New York Times example. If I have the option, I'm going to shut the window. If I have to cycle through the ad to get to the content, I'm going to have another window open so I can do something else while it's running. Circumvention software will inevitably appear, and it is relatively hard to make ad circumvention illegal.

And even if it does work, I will be avoiding sites that have interruption based ads like the plague.

So. People are whining, "like, geez, so, what's the solution, Jath?"

Here's a thought: Make the payment structure content-independent. Meaning, your browser pays for the content, and then you pay the browser however you want. You want ads, you get ads - you have to sit through your twenty seconds before you load your content. You want to pay direct, you pay a monthly fee. The site determines the entry fee. If it exceeds your threshhold, your browser asks if you're willing to pay a premium price. You could have a monthly limit, a charge account, or a bank of funds to draw from. Niche-market content providers could put together package deals. This could solve my problem, which is that I might be willing to pay for the Times online but I don't want to have seventy different bills for my internet surfing. This way, I'd have one bill, the size of which would be essentially determined by me. I think most of us might be surprised at how little internet content might cost if we went directly to the content providers with the same deal as a banner ad company: a small per-page payment.

The browser might be enabled to block banner or interruption based ads for the paying customer. You could have a "tip jar" feature to toss a few coins to free sites you thought deserved a kudo or two. Of course, content providers could choose to advertise anyway - you could request a warning service to tell you who was going to enforce banners or interruptions regardless.

It wouldn't have to work with every site, for those choosing not to opt into the system, you would simply get a little message that you were outside the toll zone, so you get what you get. The service could double up as a micropayment system for any kind of limited license software. It's generally recognized that the problem of making small payments on the internet is interfering with the potential to unleash the power of digital duplication and transfer of data: this kills two birds with one stone.

Problems:

Paying for content that turns out to suck

Dealing with all the transitional content (already has ads, doesn't want to sign up)

Too many interruptions for service options?

Still, I think it's an interesting idea worth exploring. As the devices for viewing all kinds of content (Digital teevee recorders, computers, illegally hacked DVD players) make it easier and easier to avoid that "word from our sponsors," maybe we need to start seriously looking for alternatives to sponsorship, at least under the current model. Content providers will ultimately sell their product to anyone who pays. Either we address this issue directly or the taco and truck flacks of this world are going to force a solution down our throats. With teevee it could well mean that product placement becomes god - and programs become little more than glorified commercials (Survivor, anyone?). On the internet, who knows? in ten years there could be nothing but free but little and weird content and horrific corporate pablum.

Interruption Based Ads

[CoachS]

While I agree that banner ads seem a weak solution - I practically never click through - interruption-based ads are maddening.

Part of the problem with the 20-second commercial idea is that it assumes that web surfers come for a single prolonged reading session. Maybe some do, but I typically click to a news site, scan the headlines, read an article or two, then go elsewhere. I come back a few hours later to see what's new and I pop in and out a couple of times a day to look up some information or catch up on a story somebody told me about. There's no way I'm going to sit through a 20-second commercial 5-6 times a day.

The model that's even more maddening to me are sites that spawn additional browsers without asking me. I hate clicking to a site only to have 3 more browser windows pop up with surveys and videos and ads -- even worse when you're trying to leave the site to have multiple, persistent, ads flung at you without recourse. This kind of browser-jacking is a fast way to get on my list of sites I'll never come back to.

So what's the solution? I wouldn't mind a full-screen ad that I can click past (i.e. don't have to wait the 20 seconds). The main reason I don't click on banner ads isn't because they're annoying but rather because they almost never advertise anything there that interests me. Cheap long-distance and on-line casinos are most of what I see; no thanks.

Make the ads relevent, let the users click past them with a minimum of hassle/inconvenience and make the site behind the ad useful and efficient (for those who do click through). Then you'll find success.

Just my $.02. Keep the change.

-Coach-