When is Too Much Too Much in Advertising?
January 5, 2012 by Kevin Michael Gray
It appears that in our pursuit of technology and seo optimization we have missed the mark; the Advertising mark. What makes a good advertisement anyway? What about a successful campaign? Know this… Less is always more, especially in the advertising realm. If you can figure out how to take the mission of a company and sum it up with a 2-5 word tagline then you have added significant value to that company's ad campaign. If you can figure out a way to captivate your audience with an original and compelling ad/CTA you're already that much more ahead of the curve. Today's featured article comes from digiday.com and offers some helpful tips for 'successful' ad creation. Read on.
Many of us in this industry have been fighting the good fight for a long time now to make display advertising a better outlet for brand dollars. And, if we get it right, everyone wins. But up to this point, the focus has almost entirely been on better technology. That’s not going to cut it.
From my rough calculations, the vast majority of venture-capitalist dollars, roughly $2.5 billion of $5.7 billion in the first half of 2011 alone, and strategic exits have focused on the automation of the sales and buying process, targeting and optimization.
Improving technology obviously has its benefits, but as an industry we have a bigger problem to fix: the essence of display advertising itself. We are all so caught up on acronyms and technology that we sometimes forget what it is that we are doing: We are in the business of advertising. The problem? A lot of display ads are not noticed. Beyond click-through rates hovering at fractions of fractions of a percent, 43 percent of users say they ignore and disregard banner advertising. To fix this, we need to change the economics: fewer and bigger ads. Not just bigger ads, but fewer.
The industry, as it stands, is on course to produce an estimated 4 trillion display ad impressions in 2012. That’s too many when you consider that one in two, and that’s being conservative, has zero impact. Here’s a radical solution: Cut the number of ads on each Web page in half. This could unlock billions in brand ad dollars. But while cutting supply is a critical step, it needs to be accompanied by other moves.
Targeting has to get better.
Targeted ads on balance perform better than ads that are not targeted. The current problem with targeting is that consumers are exposed to so many untargeted ads that they have learned to tune them out. Reduce the number of ads, use current targeting methodologies, and ads become that much more relevant. Leading to …Ads need to be seen.
Fewer ads on a page automatically give the remaining advertising messages a better chance to be seen. Providing advertisers the opportunity to have their message viewed is the very essence of what we do! And with fewer ads on the page, you can make the ads that remain bigger and bolder. Bigger ads are proven to perform better – large format ads get noticed 10 times more frequently than traditional banner ads. So, let creative agencies run wild with the enhanced real estate, and we will see the magic happen.Attribution needs be fixed.
A barrier to brand dollars moving online is the simple fact that, on the whole, marketers do not see the impact that display advertising has on key brand metrics as well as offline sales. There are a lot of companies working on solving this problem. A reduction in the number of ads – particularly those designed to game attribution models (you know the ones: bottom of the page, bought specifically to drop cookies and game the last-view-wins battle) will go a long way to make these models work.
