The future of Web Advertising (10)
This might be old for some of you, but Jakob Nielsen published a study on banner blindness, which shows that Internet users never look at anything that looks like an advertisement. Eyetracking shows for instance that readers “jump” straigtforward to the content.
In times where advertising budgets are shifting to the web, and where companies and most web startups rely solely on advertising for their revenues, this raises core questions. As marketers and advertising specialists search for more intrusive elaborate ways to get their message in front of the customer’s eyes, internet users fight even more (unconsciously or not) to focus on what they were looking for, i.e. content.
In Montreal, I have been reading Yannick Manuri’s blog, where he asks questions about effectiveness (here here and here). I have talked about the subject to other marketers and most of them think advertising should be blended with content so as to force high click through rates; which I view as a quick fix that will get you shot down by your audience in the long term.
What are the solutions then? I think, first everyone should question how advertising on the web should be done. What we see mostly these days are copy&paste of the messages found on print&TV: ad copy is broadcasted, over and over to the masses. Internet is the only medium which allows one-to-one and personalized communication, and that is not leverage enough actually. Ideally, the message given to each reader should be highly relevant to him/her and his current needs. Second, I think, and this is just a personal opinion, that you can’t build an industry with only advertising. The television industry has done this way for the past half-century, but unlike the web, their content is broadcasted, and most of it entertainement. People now use the web for highly focused tasks, and find information for their work, for events they will attend, communicate with friends&colleagues, etc. Those are needs, and as such, there must and will be a way to monetize it. Saying otherwise doesn’t make sense to me, it would be like, say, goods at the grocery store should be provided for free, and will be supported by advertising.
Thanks for reading my blog. The key in advertising and particularly in digital advertising in relevancy, a one-to-one and personalized communication to someone who cares. Non relevant ads will naturally be more annoying than others.
Be relevant and avoid intrusiveness.
The reason we’re so good at ignoring web ads is that we’ve had decades of practice ignoring print ads.
And unlike print ads, which I virtually never act on, I do occasionally click or watch those on the web.
I’m sure I have lots of company.
Peter Krnjevic, for me, I ignore internet ads, but when i open a magazine, i notice the ads. I think the problem with internet ads is that if you look at them, you find yourself spending too much time on the wrong thing
yannick manuri: thanks for commenting!
Guys, in all cases, behaviors are different from an individual to another.
Peter, if I needed to reach you through advertising, I would probably know statistically your behavior: if you tend to react more on tv commercials or mag ads, etc. Same for you Heri.
It’s maybe hiding behind numbers but probabilities are more reliable than randomly spreading and praying.
Yannick, I find you very confident about advertising. which is good in a way. but what i am saying is that the future is not that bright. the study by jakob nielsen just prooved that. i also don’t have official stats about CTR rates, but I talked with a manager of a big website lately and his website’s ad performance (CTR) were lower and lower every year.
if i have time, i will digg into this deeper and find serious figures about the state of advertising “acceptance” on the web.
Heri, I am confident, advertising is my day to day life.
jakob nielsen or not, advertising effectively these days is becoming more and more difficult for a lot of reasons, such as media fragmentation. But anyway, this is a good thing, it means that traditional advertisers need to think beyond the 30sec ad.
Regarding CTR, tell your friend that he’s not alone. This is a known fact in the industry. CTR will again go up with new ad formats, etc. But there is more than clicks and CTR in Internet advertising.
If you frame the discussion a bit larger and talk about the future of digital marketing (instead of focusing just on Web advertising), it’s a whole different (and much rosier!) picture.
In this bigger scheme of things, there’s a lot more choice when it comes to engaging your audience, including blogs, social media, branded content, gaming, viral, email marketing (ok, so I have a bias for this one!) or the Next Big Thing.
While clearly things are moving towards conversations *with* people, rather than speeches *at* them, I think display ads still have their place as conversation starters. But, as with any communication, context is key. Google understood this and that’s why AdWords is so successful.
I recently completed a marketing certificate, and one problem that was continually discussed was, how to keep people from skipping your store or reverting their attention from your ad.
With all this new technology being released and money being spent on these new ideas, i dont think the answer will ever be advertising on web pages. Considering the fact, that people already have their regular places to shop. On top of that, the internet websites where people shop or join for leisure, sometimes offer a membership package which offer Advertisement free environments, and TIVO doesnt help either.
Now, even celebrity campaigning is questionable, does it really matter if your favorite movie star or sports icon, wears or uses a particular brand?
If you ask me, i think the real effective way to advertise is and will always lie within marketing research, know your consumer! and it will not matter if you advertise on the computer or on a candy wrapper, because the message will always get through to your target market, why? because you will know who buys your product or pays attention to your store and your advertisment. You just cant adverstise on random pages because it just will not work
John T., so are you saying that advertising on TV/PRINT/RADIO/WEB is useless since it is considered to advertise on random pages ?
The global performance of visual advertising is dropping rapidly because ad space scarcity situation has been destroyed. It is certainly not à layout problem or a transfer phase between TV and online media. Everybody in the industry is playing with the message saturation knob while the average guy daily ration of information is already maxed. Strong brands can easily play product placement in this situation but I have to agree on the fact that most of today’s advertising money is spent on already-gone ROI theories.
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