on banner advertising
August 20th, 2007
With a redesign of Cheezhead in the works, I found Toby Dayton’s recent blog post entitled Why Daily Newspaper Web Sites Will Never Win quite timely. In it, he derides the Star Tribune for unnecessary, downright ugly advertising.
… the Star Tribune has somehow decided that it’s a good thing to have background ‘wallpaper’ behind their site featuring a local advertiser.
Although the wallpaper seems to be gone, an image tells the story.
No doubt a bit obnoxious, but it’s interesting the same time Dayton’s post comes out, MySpace runs wallpaper promoting State Farm’s NowWhat.com.
Equal offenders? ‘Course not. Same tactic, but MySpace pulls it off brilliantly, integrating the ad in a curious way that stands out while not ticking off the user. Or at least it didn’t tick me off. The ad only fails in being relevant to me personally. So what advertising is good and what causes the need to “recover from the nausea.”
A quick history lesson:
In the dawn of the Web, banner ads were hyped as the next media revolution. They were measurable, cheap, editable on the fly and could cover a lot of ground. Problem was, they didn’t work so well. This led to a rash of unpopular tactics such as pop-ups. Driving users away, this strategy is mostly a thing of the past. A few years into the 2000s, Google figured out and perfected serving ads that 1) weren’t intrusive and 2) were relevant for the end user could be pretty successful. The offering was great for advertisers and publishers as well, but let’s focus.
Therein lies the secret: Is your advertising relevant and unobtrusive? For Dayton, the Tribune fails this test.
Believe it or not, however, there are many sites where I want to checkout the advertisers. TechCrunch, for example, comes to mind. What are the new services and technologies out there? What start-ups are making noise. I’m interested in who’s advertising on SHRM and ERE. And for many of sites, Cheezhead included, without advertising dollars, they might not exist.
What’s next, of course, is knowing what ads are desirable and for which users individually. Behavioral targeting, as it’s sometimes called, is hot. Still by-and-large a fountain of youth, but many businesses are trying to figure it out, presumably chasing mad, mad riches in the process.
Advertising in any form will always be a nuisance to some. Most see it as a necessary evil, like changing diapers or your car’s oil. Advertising, when done right, can even be desirable to the masses. But one thing’s for sure: It’s here to stay and the market, in the end, will decide what sticks.
August 20th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
This is so right on. I happen to live in the Twin Cities…the ST is a growing, constant joke.
August 20th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Dayton’s own site, JobDig.com, serves up banner ads that are questionable. Visitors see ads from Sirius, Blockbuster and Edmunds.com. Are job seekers on a job board looking to spend money subscribing to satellite radio, renting a movie and buying a car? Probably not.
August 20th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Thanks for the comments on the post, and I couldn’t agree more with your analysis. Advertising, if done well, can be terrifically enjoyable and entertaining. Most of the time, with any type of decent targeting, advertising can be informative and helpful. As you rightly point out, there are plenty of media vehicles where the advertising constitutes a meaningful portion of the overall value proposition and some advertising that I would classify as content as much as the actual content itself. One of my favorite nights of the year is going to see the British Television Advertising Awards at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Imagine paying money for the privilege of sitting through 90 minutes of commercials! It’s worth every penny, and every year, I leave that event lamenting the fact that American advertising is, for the most part, horrendously boring and uninspired. And when it is done poorly, being devoid of any creativity, thought, or consideration for the audience, advertising can be extremely aggravating. Not only is the advertiser creating a negative impression in the minds of its target audience, but the media vehicle itself suffers as well. Sadly, far too few media companies pay close enough attention to what their advertisers are doing to their product.
August 22nd, 2007 at 8:13 pm
Hi Joel,
While I agree with most of your points, I’d say that most of the responsibility falls on the ad agencies and advertisers. The MySpace implementation is most likely a result of purchasing all the inventory on the page and then synchronizing the ads. The same exact experience could easily have been done on the Star Tribune web site by purchasing all the ad space instead of just the wallpaper ad. It’s just that State Farm has a media planner and creative team that is providing an extremely creative solution that is a good use of the space. Many publishers have the same types of advertising placements, it’s what we do with those placements that can either make them annoying or enjoyable. But if publishers waited for great creative, they’d probably go out of business. I think it is the ad industry that needs to step up and start thinking about the ad/brand experience.