Ad banners are signposts: November 02, 1998 issue of New Thinking

November 02, 1998 New Thinking:
Ad banners are signposts

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November 02, 1998

Ad banners are signposts

By Gerry McGovern

On the Internet, ad banners act as signposts.

The advertising industry yearns for what it knows best. Those wonderful 30-second television ads that reached huge numbers of people. Those short and snappy radio ads; those full-page color mega-statements; those billboards that made their screaming point to busy motorists as they flashed by.

Yes, the advertising industry has been wonderful at getting attention. But as Esther Dyson said at a recent conference, “On the Internet, don’t get attention, give attention.” Giving attention is a whole different ball game, one that the advertising industry is inherently not suited to playing.

You see, advertisers are brilliant at getting attention but then they feel their job is done. Driven by the adrenaline urge of condensing every message into simple sound bytes, they feel lost and bored when it comes to dealing with the customer whose attention they have got.

‘Ad banners aren’t working,’ we now hear on a regular basis. Before I examine the validity of that statement, let’s first examine the proposed remedy. The essential remedy, as proposed by advertisers, almost always involves eating up more bandwidth, as we race back to the old school of flood the eyeballs with fancy imagery tactics. Some advertisers eagerly propose that if we place a full-screen ad in front of someone we will definitely get more of their attention.

Well, I absolutely agree. It’s just like spitting in someone’s face. You really do get their attention. I can guarantee you that if you place a full screen ad in front of me before I visit your site that I will immediately hit the back button and never visit you again. But you will have got my attention, though, because I will remember to tell other people to avoid you like a plague.

Okay, ad banners are small, and click-throughs on these banners have been dropping. However, maybe they are small because that’s the size they need to be in the environment they operate within. It can also be argued that with so many more people getting onto the Internet and with the general demographic of users expanding, that click-through rates will inevitably drop.

In fact, a recent survey by NetRatings found that banner ads significantly increase the audience reach of a product, regardless of whether or not the consumer clicks on them. Other surveys and reports during 1998 have, however, indicated that click-through rates are now on average less than 2 percent for banner ads. (For most direct mail, it’s less than 1 percent.) In April, AdKnowledge reported that the cost per thousand impressions of banner ads had declined 6 percent over the previous year to USD36.

But as I said at the beginning of this piece, the ad banner is just a signpost on the Internet, sending those who want to go to your website in the right direction. The real job for the Internet marketer is to be done at the website. This is the place where you give attention to the customer. This is the place where you provide relevant, up-to-date information, where you invite feedback and dialogue. This is the place where you stop being fancy and start being useful.

In a marketing and advertising industry, so often intoxicated by that which shimmers, shooting the ad banner masks an inability to come to terms with a new world with new rules.

Gerry McGovern

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It’s just like spitting in someone’s face. You really do get their attention.