Advertising: Why Super Banners are Lame and Publishers are Perishing (Even Online)
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Written By Noah Mallin | March 10, 2009 | Share This
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When people don’t pay attention to me I like to get up in their faces and SCREAM REALLY LOUDLY. What gets me is that they run away and avoid me after that – sometimes they never come back. OK, fair enough, I don’t actually scream in people’s faces, unless I’m doing my favorite scene from Full Metal Jacket at office happy hours.
So if a reasonable person (and I like to think I am one) wouldn’t expect to scream and wave their arms in people’s faces and say “HellOOOOO Loook at MEEE!” and expect to keep any friends, why do 27 major online publishers think that doing the advertising equivalent of the same will answer their monetary prayers?
These publishers, all members of OPA (Online Publishers Association), include such heavy hitters as the New York Times, USA Today, and ESPN. Collectively they introduced new ad formats today that they claim will render the lowly banner ad obsolete – they’ve got the heat maps to prove it! See how much eyeball hotness everything but the ads are getting?
Not to defend banner ads but for page surfaces that don’t serve any navigation purpose and with little text, what did you expect? Lingering? Yes, I agree that banners are often ignored and compared to other forms of online advertising such as search ads are rarely clicked. So the solution these folks are embracing, what I like to call Super Banners, is to make the surface bigger, louder, flashier and harder to ignore. Now you’ll really want to click on it. Won’t you?
Let’s face it, the banner ad is an inherently broken model. To some extent this is due to the unreasonable expectation that because it’s online it should be measured by clicks. Really, it’s a static ad like a billboard or a print page and it shouldn’t be expected to function as much more beyond that. Forcing the ad into a bigger and more obnoxious format will only make the user experience suffer.
Marketers similarly have to ask themselves – what’s a better use of video assets? Embedding them in an expandable ad that will serve to annoy and vex visitors or placing them on a social media property like YouTube where they can drive user engagement, even if it means less control.
Publishers are making less money (if at all) offline and online revenue has yet to catch up. If banner ads won’t do it and these new super banners will only serve to annoy, what’s the solution?
Far be it for me to proselytize but part of the issue here is making the content valuable to marketers beyond the broad demographics of a particular website. Contextual ads are one way of doing this. Another idea is finding unique ways to bring sponsored responses to searches and suggestions in-site, without making for an “over-marketed” experience for users.
Perhaps another approach might be what The Guardian is doing in the UK. Recognizing that their content is their most valuable resource they are opening up their content API to developers to do with what they will – radical stuff. The true genius part is that they are using the open platform model as a wedge to expand their advertising network – says the paper: “The Guardian is positioning its Open Platform as a commercial venture, requiring partners to carry its advertising as part of its terms and conditions.”
While this probably won’t work for smaller publishers, for large long-lived institutions with deep archives and brand equity like the Guardian or the New York Times, this is a leg up on expanding and controlling the monetization of their content and a first step in coming to grips with another source of revenue drainage – content aggregators like The Huffington Post.
Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.
Topics: Advertising: Online, ECommerce, Publishing |