What is the future of display advertising?
Apart from search, display advertising is another way to advertise online. They include banner ads and rich media. They are separate from text based ads because they use image, audio and media to get the message across. While click through rates are not incredibly high, they are a great way to create brand awareness as advertisers can target consumers on websites that they like to spend their time on.
The first 468×68 pixel banner ad was placed on hotwired in 1995 and it had the call to action ‘click here’. It generated a click through ratio of 25 %( Chaffey 2012) . This was an incredible high conversion rate. Such high conversion rates no longer exist and most internet users have developed Banner blindness. This involves users not following the call to action as they once did. We now ignore everything that we see online that we think looks like an ad. Nowadays conversion rates consist of about 0.1-0.2%. If conversion rates are so low it is a wonder that banner ads are used at all to advertise online. They can be considered too expensive. You can also run the risk of damaging your brand if your ad shows up on a site that is deemed to be inappropriate, Such as a gambling site or a pornography website. If your product is for families and children this could completely ruin your brand reputation.
Kfir Moyal included some interesting statistics in his post ‘is display dead’ on the marketing pilgrim website that advertisers should consider. For example did you know that you are more likely to get a royal flush in poker than you are to click on a banner ad? Or that you are more likely to survive a plane crash than you are to click on a banner ad. These statistics really put into perspective the small numbers that complete the call to action that is asked of them.
Consumers are just not engaging with display advertisement the way that they used to and because of this marketers have to change the way display advertisements work. A new strategy that was launched in the last few years has been to entice your audience to interact with the ads without the viewer having to leave their current webpage at all. Rich media creative company media banners launched a campaign for the movie ‘pirates of the Caribbean: at a worlds end’. The banner ads were capable for playing back to back videos and you were even capable of seeing a whole website inside the advert. Dimitry Loffe, the CEO of Media Banners explains that they took the Disney website and expanded it to the scope of the whole internet (Mathew G. Nelsen). It didn’t matter what actual website you were on, you were still viewing the Disney movie website.
In the beginning of 2013 online advertising has increased. Pay per Click (PPC), mainly google Ad words accounts for half of the revenue spent during the first half of the year, (€ 44.8 M), while display ads count for 39% of the share. (Anthony Quigley) It is predicted that with the huge amount of people with mobile devices that display advertising will become less important. In markets such as the US and Western European countries the revenue from display ads on the mobile web has been taken over by in- app advertising. (Quinton O’Reilly) During 2013 the expected growth of advertising in the USA was to reach $20 billion which was more than the 2013 NASA budget.
‘Mobile first’ was the battle cry for some time when it came to display advertising according to Robert Hof. Neal Mohan, Google’s vice president of display advertising said that the key now and going forward is to develop ads that can seamlessly move from one device to another. This is important because on average 90% of consumers start a task on one device and end on another (Robert Hof).
Many digital marketers believe that this change doesn’t mark the death of display advertising but instead it marks a sort of rebirth. The rules have now changed and new ways to encourage consumers to interact with your brand have to be considered and developed.
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