8 May 2009
Buggy Whips — Now Half-Price!
Posted by robgraham under: Engagement marketing .
When I first started in the online ad business (late 1990s) online advertising was a pretty straightforward environment to navigate. You created a picture of a particular size, you called it an ad, and he gave it to a publisher or to an ad network to give a publisher and you were in the online advertising business.
Early ads were nothing more than sophisticated than large buttons that were designed to take consumers from where they were to where the advertiser wanted them to be. While early pioneers managed drive a lot of traffic to their websites, the novelty of the model quickly wore off in for the last 10 years or so has been a lukewarm mainstay of the online advertising business.
Today, online ads are going into a rapid decline with regard to their marketing and advertising effectiveness. As traffic driving tools, they’ve never been very effective. The truth of the matter is that most consumers aren’t comfortable with clicking on ads that takes them away from what they are already doing. On the other side of things, publishers who placed these ads on their pages are also in a pickle. While they want their advertisers to find success on their pages, every click on an ad in essence drives traffic away from those pages. That being said, click through rates across the board are dismally low today.
Furthermore, click through rates are largely indicative of absolutely nothing. While most marketers strive to drive traffic to their landing pages, what’s really important here is not to measure how many people clicked on the ad but to measure how many people accomplished what was the advertiser wanted them to accomplish once they arrived on the landing page.
All that aside, the real issue with display advertising today is that it’s no longer the only game in town. Apart from a general lack of engagement, most display advertising has become page clutter-almost invisible to the consumers who visit.
The world of online advertising alternatives runs the gamut from interactive rich media ads, to highly targeted search ads, to engaging video ads, to social networks and instant communications models. In short, there are plenty of ways of communicating with consumers in interesting and engaging ways that don’t require them to click on an ad and go someplace else.
Historically, display ads may turn out to have been a bridge technology that got the market from point to point. They have served their purpose but the alternatives we have today make them the ‘horse-drawn carriage’ of online marketing. I think it’s time we started looking for the online advertising trains, planes and automobiles of the future.