More Focus On Online Ads
from the wait-a-second... dept
With all the recent studies suggesting the doom of online advertising, I though this study was interesting: dot coms are focusing more on online advertising. Apparently they realized it’s a lot cheaper than print advertising and they can track it much better. This goes against all the other reports that were saying that online advertising was useless and dot coms were dropping out of all types of advertising.
Comments on “More Focus On Online Ads”
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i think that online advertising has yet to be truly understood.. I mean, it’s almost a complete paradigm shift for this medium. Advertisers are used to just paying boatloads of money for ads with little or no ability to track efficacy.. online changes all of this.
Re: No Subject Given
That’s true to some extent… however, I think originally (at least) advertisers overreacted too far when they realized they could track online ads. So, they watched clickthroughs, and that was all they thought about… and when they saw clickthroughs of 1 tenth of 1 percent they flipped out and stopped advertising. What they forget is that in a magazine ad there’s no such thing as a clickthrough. Ads can be used for simple branding purposes as well, and I think some online ads are beginning to realize that as well. They’re doing they’re best just to catch people’s attention, and give them information right there – and not necessarily involve click throughs as a necessary tracking mechanism. The problem with that, though, is how do you track “brand recognition” as tied to an online ad…
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So this discussion brings up the questions: “Do you remember any online ads you’ve ever seen?” and “Which ones and why?”… I mean, everyone remembers a few TV commercials or printed ads, but I don’t think I can remember ANY banner ads. Except maybe those annoying ones where they ask you to click on some strange animal racing back and forth across your screen. But I don’t even remember what that was trying to sell me. Who comes up with these ads anyway? Must be the same two guys or something b/c EVERY banner ad looks the same.
Wait, I just thought of a unique ad that I sorta remember. It’s on slashdot all the time, the one where a giant penguin says, “Good evening, Mr. Gates”… But I still don’t remember what company that was for .. VA Linux? I’m not even sure.
I just dread the day when banner ads start talking. The flashing ones are bad enough. Is there any hope that banner ads won’t get more annoying in their attempts to get people’s attention? As bandwidth gets better, will we have a bunch of silent (hopefully) mini-movies flashing ‘Click Here’ on the edges of our browsers?
I’ll stop rambling now. I just wanted to rant on how useless I think the current banner ads are.
Re: Re: Re: No Subject Given, --None Taken. :)
Actually, I do remember quite a few banner ads I’ve seen. There’s also been a number of companies or products that I first heard of because of banner ads.
Also, as for your concept of banner ads talking… that happened a long time ago. I can’t find the article about it, but I remember someone playing around with that at least two years ago (and probably before that). It was big news. I think it was a company like AT&T or some other big company that had a banner ad showing a little girl who talked… There was an article that pissed me off because they described it like a revolutionary idea. It didn’t last long because it really pissed people off.
Also, there have been some banner ads that I’ve seen in the past with sound (sometimes freaking me out). I tend to open many browser windows at once, so when one starts spewing sound, I’m often confused where it’s coming from. I do remember, though, that my favorite ad banner (HP’s mopier ad that was the game of “pong” from early 1997) I only discovered because the stupid ball was making a noise as it bounced off the walls…
I also know there are some sites that keep collections of cool banner ads (kinda like adcritic), so apparently there are others who like to remember cool banner ads.
Re: Re: Re:2 No Subject Given, --None Taken. :)
I agree with Mike’s point about people paying a bit too much attention to clickthroughs… but, you give people access to new data, and they go crazy. Brand building is a cornerstone of advertising — you can’t expect people to buy your product the first time they hear about you. You have to invade their mindspace, little by little, until one day they don’t even realize what little brand zombies they’ve become..